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
-
Indexing images? did something just happen?
did google stop indexing images? we had 563 in sept and now we have 1?
Image & Video Optimization | | bakergraphix_yahoo.com0 -
Why are my blog slideshow images not indexed?
I'm managing a design blog hosted on WordPress. Each "design project" article includes a slideshow with additional images (and captions) for the project - these are images and text not found in the article itself. Every slide has the same page path as the article, but a different query param at the end. So if the article is /article the first slide would be /article?slide=1 for example. I'm having two issues: The slideshow images don't seem to be getting indexed. Screaming Frog reports duplicate meta descriptions and title tags for each slideshow page (same meta as article). I want to do what's best overall from an SEO perspective. Having the slideshow images show in Google image search is a must. And having the captions indexed might help too? But I want the Google image results linking to the article and not the individual slideshow pages. And I don't want duplicate meta issues. What's the best thing to do? Submit a sitemap that lists both article and slideshow images? "Rel canonical" the param'd slideshow urls to the base article url (not sure this makes total sense, since slide content is different from the article)? Get rid of slideshow altogether and put images in body? Some combo of these? Hopefully this makes sense. Any thoughts appreciated!
Image & Video Optimization | | theoHP0 -
Image results Bing vs Google
I have a website with a number of images and I have optimized all of the images on both a file name and ALT text level, relevant to content on the page they are published on. I haven't created a separate image sitemap, but the strange thing is that Google has all of my images indexed and they can be found for the right keywords, but when I look in BING! images, there is no image indexed available at all ...
Image & Video Optimization | | ConclusionDigital0 -
Google images not showing on SERP
Hi, I recently noticed that after a specific name search, Google images on the 'Web' SERP are no longer showing up. About a month ago, there were atleast 4-5 headshots of this particular person showing up whenever his name was searched. Now no images are showing, just the ten organic links and two links from adwords campaign we have going. The images are still optimized and some are even from editorial sites. Does anyone know what may have caused the images to disappear and what we can do to bring them back to the main SERP? (Not sure if it matters but we are in Canada) Thanks
Image & Video Optimization | | Lorne_Marr0 -
Optimizing Images Already on Website
I am familiar with tools to reduce jpeg images file size etc before uploading to website. After jpeg images are uploaded to a website, what can be done to enhance load speed of these images? Any software to compress images on a website already?
Image & Video Optimization | | khi50 -
SEO And Images: 2014 Tips
What is a good "image" strategy? All I really know is to make sure to use images that you create yourself and/or images that are approved for free commercial use and add alt tags. Right now, just making sure all our pages have images and updating some of the lower quality ones would surely help us, but I'm hoping someone can add a little detail into how best to use images for seo, conversions and how to avoid slowing our site way down by adding more (we do have the smushit plugin which helps some). Thanks, Ruben Our site is www.kempruge.com
Image & Video Optimization | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
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 -
Why Google doesn't want to show our images?
Our website http://www.fiberscope.net has a good positions in search for the most of important keywords, but for some reason store's images are not visible in search results. All images have ALT attributes but represented in Google Images very poor. Any ideas and suggestions regarding this issue?
Image & Video Optimization | | Meditinc.com0