H1 image
-
Hi,
I was talking to a web consultant today that teaches SEO, he said that an image is ok as an h1 tag as long as it has an alt tag. This is something new to me and something that I've always tried to avoid. Does this now work?
Thanks
-
And if you need a technical explanation on this, Rob, including some proof, here it is:
http://rob-hammond.co.uk/how-google-handles-alt-text-in-h1-tags
(look at the bottom what they have to say about other SEs besides google.)
also look at this, a similar question asked earlier in SEOmoz Q&A:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-images-work-as-a-h1
warm regards to all!
-
I wouldn't say that the advice you were given was wrong but like anything there is good ways to do things and there are always better ways to do things.
For instance lets say you are a small business with a low budget and the idea of re-working your entire site or theme isn't a viable solution. Or maybe your site is just a single page and there isn't the need for a heading. That said implementing an H1 as an image with appropriate alt text isn't a horrible solution.
What is not a good solution is implementing an H1 on an image just to hide overly spammy and descriptive alt text underneath the image and slide it in as an H1 on the page.
-
I agree with Amit, I am sitting here trying to come up with a logical reason why you would ever need to set up your site with a image in a h1 tag in the first place. You should re-think your overall site structure if this is how you have it set up.
If you are simply just wanting to display a nicer headline, look into embedding a web safe font with CSS
-
Hey Rob,
Let's take a human angle at the h1 tag. It symbolizes "heading". Heading to a piece of information which can be an article, a blog post or company intro/product description on a website.
It's a very very common practice to give a heading to any information that we (humans) want to present. It's very natural and meaningful too as it tells our readers what to expect.
This is probably why search engines give importance to h1 tag(main heading), they are trying to think like humans do, to determine the relevancy of a certain page to corresponding search query.
Similarly alt text gives them an idea that the image is relevant to the subject talked about on the page.
So, I hope that explains. You should continue to avoid using image in h1 tag.
Write a nice compelling heading for your human visitors then, for search engine spiders, wrap it in h1 tag and use your main keyword once (if it isn't there naturally).
Hope that helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Not using alt tags for decorative images?
Hi everyone, My coworker recently stumbled across this article that instructs you to not to alt text for "decorative images" as you might get penalized you for over optimization https://www.shopify.com/blog/7412852-10-must-know-image-optimization-tips Has anyone heard of this or have any thoughts?
Image & Video Optimization | | AliMac260 -
All images suddenly deindexed from google sitemap tab.
All my images de-indexed from google as reported in sitemap tab. There are more then 10k+ images that are earlier indexed but suddenly all image are de-indexed. Is that a GWT bug or we have been penalized by google for doing something wrong.Sharing the screenshot. image-deindexed-issue.PNG
Image & Video Optimization | | RaviM0 -
Right hand side Google Local profile image pulling from 3rd party site
Hello! When googling our company's name, the Google Local profile comes up on the right hand side with the reviews, address, phone number, etc. Those are all fine but the main photo being used is not the one specified in the Google My Business profile but it seems to be pulling from a 3rd party site that recently added a link and an image to our website. Why is this happening and can we specify the image that shows up? Your help will be very much appreciated!!!
Image & Video Optimization | | uniseo10 -
How to embed a video in our product image
Hi We use bigcommerce and want to add a video to each product . We want to add a video link in the corner of the product image and have the video play when this tab is clicked. Can anyone tell us how to do this Regards
Image & Video Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Images not being indexed by Google
Greetings, we have an image heavy site (it's a fashion blog that is over 11 years old) and for some reason our images aren't being indexed by google. We've looked at the robot.txt, CDN (we're using cloudfont via Amazon), etc as well as searched google webmaster. We still can't figure it out. None of the images on our pages are being indexed. Any help you could provide would be GREATLY appreciated Site: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com Sitemap: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com/sitemap_index.xml Image sitemap: http://www.thebudgetfashionista.com/sitemap-image.xml
Image & Video Optimization | | digitalundivided0 -
Meta Tags for Images in Multiple Galleries
For a while now we've had an outside SEO consultant as well as having me in-house doing a variety of work. One of the things our consultant would do was writing up optimized alt & title tags for the image galleries on our ecommerce sites. Recently what came up was what to do when a image appears in multiple galleries (e.g. an image of a bedroom could appear in both the bedrooms gallery & the accent wall gallery). We're not sure whether it would be best practices to use the same exact alt & title tags for an image in all the galleries it appears in or whether that would be too much duplication and each gallery should have different tags despite being the same image. None of it is being done in a deceptive manner, we're just been tailoring how we explain the image based on the specific gallery, landing page, etc. Our consultant is saying that an image should always have the same tags across the entirety of the site but I'm more of the mind that varying them by specific page would help images more readily rank for multiple relevant terms. Any advice?
Image & Video Optimization | | MikeRoberts0 -
Google Image Search?
We get very little search traffic from the images on our site & I can't necessarily figure out why? We post a ton & tag them correctly, we've got to be missing something? We are a Wordpress blog, can anyone provide some quality articles on Image search or have suggestions that should help to get more traffic? Our site does fairly well, as we get over 100k/visits a month, so we'd really like to get more traffic from our images.
Image & Video Optimization | | seointern0 -
Hosting All Content Images On Flickr For Blog - What are SEO implications?
Hi, I am starting a travel blog and thought of the idea of hosting all the content images over at Flickr and just calling them into my blog content when needed. Benefits: push traffic over to my Flickr account pull traffic from Flickr to my blog However, I was just wondering about any SEO implications of having 3-4 links per post pointing to Flickr. Is this spammy? Will I lose my juice? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
Image & Video Optimization | | DigitalLeaf0