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An image link is a graphic image that typically links to another online document, such as a webpage, PDF file, video, Excel spreadsheet, etc. Like text links, image links can also point to another location on the same page.
Alt text is "alternative text" that is placed in the code for an image. It is displayed when the mouse cursor hovers over the image (fig. 1). The text is also visible if an image is unable to load (fig.2). Alt text is especially useful to people using screen readers.
An image map is a graphic image containing one or more invisible clickable regions, called hotspots, allowing several hyperlinks from a single image.
For example, an image could be a map of the World with each continent split into different clickable hotspots. When a visitor clicks on one of the hotspots, they are taken to the respective online document.
Many search engines will not crawl links inside an image map because of the potential for spam abuse. But that doesn't mean you should stay away from using image maps. To ensure search engines crawl the links contained with an image map, you should also duplicate the links as conventional text or image links somewhere else on the page and/or a sitemap.
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