What happens when you put an image in an H1 tag?

[eVacStore]

I am currently updating some H1 tags for my site but the tags are generated automatically by the text that is entered into a field on our content manager software. However because we need an image in this area as well, the entire field including the code for the image is surrounded by an H1 tag.

Is this bad for SEO?

[loopyal]

Thank you Dan (and Bill).

In SEO talk, everything seems to boil down to getting ranked, but the more important thing, I've always thought, is helping readers (and the search engines) to understand what the page is about - but almost nobody talks about that.

[evolvingSEO]

In general its bad practice to put images in the H1. This doesn't mean if you just stuff a few keywords in them that you'll rank better either. But the Header tags are meant to hold text - text that accurately describes to the reader what they should expect to see below the header.

Bill's article on headers is fantastic.

And the original source from w3.org says:

"A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces...." - basically that it's meant for text. Source

So as Bill says, if you correctly set up a semantic relationship between the title, headers and content on the page, you can help users and engines understand what the page is "about" and thus rank better in that sense.

Hope that helps!!

-Dan