So, I'm creating a thumbnail gallery as a non-flash option for my site. Each picture will have alt tag info as well as text descriptions on the page. Well I'm noticing that as I'm filling in all these descriptions, I have lots of repeating words. Mainly it's because it's describing the metal types that are used, which is necessary.

I know that repeating words in Meta tags is not a good thing but will I be penalized for repeating "phrases" in text?

Thanks!

Possibly, it really depends on how much repeating you are doing on the page. There is no hard and fast number. The reason that Google bot penalizes for repeating body content (as they do meta information) is because developers used to "keyword stuff" content pages. For example, they would repeat important keywords in the body and set the color of the font as the same as the background so you could not see the keywords. Stuff like that is why Google bot penalizes for excess keywords.

so long as all your alt tags are not exactly the same - and are relevant to the photo, page or site content - you should have no problems - and in fact a bit of legitimate repetition will likely help your rankings - its just stuffing thats frowned upon as eric said...