Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.
-
Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question:
"We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?"Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing.
Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content.
Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well."
What is your opinion on that answer?
-
I was speaking in terms of the pictures in your portfolio on your site not the blog, as I assumed those were the images you were talking about. Was I incorrect?
-
Maybe because my blog is now on blog.celynnenphotography.co.uk and I've just told Bing and Google about it?
-
Loan,
The architecture of your site makes your images reliant on JavaScript to be visible in the browser and to bots, which means that the only thing search engines have to go on as far as an understanding of your site is the meta data but in a quick look, I'm not even sure the URLs that the images are on are getting crawled. It seems that Google image search contains images from a previous iteration of your website but it is not able to find those images now if you click on any of them. If you want your images to be found in search, I'd recommend you get with your developers and have them come up with an alternative to the current architecture.
Do this search and see if you can click through to any of your images: site:celynnenphotography.co.uk -inurl:blog
-
Your web developers are hiding behind a content management system that is poorly designed, and their ignorance of ALT tags for images.
I am also a professional photographer (as well as a Google-certified photographer for panoramic business photos, too).
ALT tags were developed for the visually impaired, so that a text reader could read a description of the image to someone who couldn't see it.
In some cases, sites are required by their brand standards or internal guidelines to comply with ADA requirements and have ALT tags in place for images.
I would tell the web developers that the interface needs to have ALT tags available, and if not, I'd try to move to a different platform that supports this.
The meta information is nice, but ALT tags are critical. Dreamweaver (current versions) for example, won't let you add an image to a Web page, without putting in an ALT tag for the image.
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
-
Ranking dropped after changing title tag
I recently changed my company's site homepage title tag to make it start with our target keyword. The page was originally at page #7 or #8 and dropped to page #17 directly after I changed the page title. Is this normal? Is it's a temporary drop or should I change it back to the previous title.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ForumOne0 -
How much is the importance of grammar and formation of sentence in Meta Title and Description in SEO
We are having, say around 100 products, cakes to be specific, with different flavors, available in more than 100000 areas of 200 plus cities. Now to make it SEO friendly, we have an algorithm which creates a unique page for each cake name, with area name, and few keywords, so that if customer is searching for cake delivery in any specific area of specific city, the user will easily find the right page. Now the thing is - when creating such unique pages for different combinations of cake, city and areas, it is also creating some content. So we wanted to know how much is the importance given to Grammatically correct statement compared to incorrect statement in ranking a page. for example: there is 1Kg Chocolate Cake, available in Satellite Area of Ahmedabad city, which one of the following Page title will have higher ranking? Case A: Send 1Kg chocolate cake to satellite area ahmedabad online Case B: Online 1kg Chocolate Cake delivery in Satellite Ahmedabad In Case A: the statement contains all keywords, but there are some grammatical mistakes in formation of statement as well as Capital Characters are not used for Satellite (Area name) and Ahmedabad (City name) In Case B: the statement is grammatical proper, as well as capital characters are used for Area name and City name. Does all search engine also have their algorithm designed to analyze the grammatical structure of page title or it just scans the keywords? Thanks in advance. Team Midnightcake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | midnightcake1 -
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Brand in Title Tag - a Ranking Factor for Scaling Big Websites?
I'm in the middle of redesigning title tags on a large ecommerce site - approximately 9000 product pages. The old structure was -(product name/description) | (Website/Brand) So an example would be - Big League Chew - 13 oz. | Target - With 'Target' Being the site's brand and appearing on each. With Google's new Title Tag display, our title tags are too long now. Unfortunately, our Brand/Website is HUGE - over 18 characters. My question is two fold - 1. Is it OK to remove brand from the title tags of some particularly long names? Will this impact ranking? 2. Does Google look for brand in these title tags, and more specifically: brand consistency in title tags? I'd love to cut the brand out of some as the product name is the biggest click-through element by far - but I don't want to affect rankings. My 'gut' says that I should focus on clickthrough rate with title tags and cut brand where necessary. Does anyone have thoughts on this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blenny0 -
- Truth ? ''link building isn't considered a suitable way of promotion as per recent search engine updates''
I need SEO. A SEO consultant said: ''link building isn't considered a suitable way of promotion as per recent search engine updates'' they mention: ''Therefore we would be undertaking a range of promotional exercises such as blog postings, social book marking, press release, etc that are more effective for ensuring best possible rankings for the website.'' Do you agree? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigBlaze2051 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
Looking for good examples of website's geotargeting
I am looking for some examples of sites that handle their global presence well (geotargeting and languages), ideally from a single .com domain thanks! Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | firstconversion0 -
.com Outranking my ccTLD's and cannot figure out why.
So I have a client that has a number of sites for a number of different countries with their specific ccTLD. They also have a .com in the US. The problem is that the UK site hardly ranks for anything while the .com ranks for a ton in the UK. I have setup GWT for the UK and the .com to be specific to their geographic locations. So I have the ccTLD and I have GWT showing where I want these sites to rank. Problem is it apparently is not working....Any clues as to what else I could do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt0