Alt tags on common images bad?

[ThePokerBank]

On my site I have a number of bullet point images in the navigation that have the alt tag 'bullet'. I was just checking a keyword density tool and I noticed that the keyword density for phrases like 'bullet bullet bullet' far surpass any other poker related keyword on my site.

So anyways, I went to google and typed in some competitive keywords that I rank okay for with the word 'bullet' after them. It turns out that I am #1 for these term (not beenficial at all, just a test).

Now my question is; is the presence of such a high number of 'bullet' words that google picks up over-competing for keywords that I actually want to rank well for? Because in the keyword density tool, the phrase 'bullet bullet bullet' comes up 3.44% of the time whilst the nearest actual key phrase is coming up about 0.62% of the time.

So in general, is it in my best interest to not have alt tags for such commonly recurring images that are of no benefit to the user? And also, do you anticipate that the presence of these alt tags effect your position in serps?


Thanks in advance.

[jagan]

As per me 3.44% keyword density is fine with google, i think upto 6% is fine if you have nice contents with other keyword! More than 6% is called keyword stuffing and may be penalised your website in serp's for a particular keywords!

[losercore]

Well this presents a problem.

Your alt tags are taking up your keywords for the page.

Fix - You need more content with keywords or you need to remove the alt tags on those images. You do not want to give those images alt tags like poker. That is for sure stuffing. You couls always give one or two but that's no point.

I sometimes use alttags for small images like that but often not. I've used "poker bullet" for example. It's not stuffing but trust me you will get hits for "poker bullets" all the time because people are searching for what the term bullets means in poker. It's pretty funny really. This is bad though. The last thing you want is a hit for a keyword that has nothing to do with your page. You might as well say goodbye to that page if you start getting a number of hits that have nothing to do with the content of that page.

If you have like 20+ bullets you may be better off not having an alt tag on those images.

[Randy]

Here's a really simple solution: don't use images for your bullet points. You're just needlessly creating a larger page with more code bloat that loads slower. Then you don't have to worry about the alt text issue.

If you decide to keep the bullet images, then yes, you should probably remove the alt text.

[ThePokerBank]

Okay thanks guys for the great help. I removed the alt tags on all of the bullets. They were part of the navigation so there was about 30 of them on the same page each with the 'bullet' alt tag. I decided to keep the images instead of text because they are a key part of the design for the site.

Hopefully this will help give the important key words some more weight. Thanks again.