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    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. On-Page Optimization
    4. Background Images and ALT text

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    Background Images and ALT text

    On-Page Optimization
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    • MichaelGregory
      MichaelGregory last edited by

      We pretty much exclusively use background images for our sites. How do I add in alt text? I tried a Google search for this issue and the best answer I could find was "Use the 'title' tag in the containing div", but that was from 2010.

      Is there a better way to do it? And no, we're not going to switch to using standard images, because background images are way more slick for UX.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • nans
        nans @Mobilio last edited by

        Does it has any positive effect on ranking? (seo)

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Mobilio
          Mobilio last edited by

          You can't use ALT text to background images.

          If your images are loaded as img tag then you have title, alt. Example:

          But background images isn't regular images loaded with img tag. They can be loaded only with CSS styling. And therefore they doesn't comes with title and alt. Example:

          As you can see you can't use title or alt for image there. Only way is to define title as this:

          or better this one:

          I know that isn't 100% background but also helps.

          Alternative way can be ARIA. If you love background images but really wish alt text you can use WAI-ARIA and define them as:

          ...
          But GoogleBot doesn't support aria-label for now.

          nans 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 3
          • erickcalderon
            erickcalderon last edited by

            Yes for screen readers and using it as alt and title for your images that are there. So you are not trying to trick Google, you are trying to figure out a way to mark what is actually there. For google image search, I have had success ranking images even if used as backgrounds in divs by naming them with what I was trying to rank them for. Since I could not use alt or title I named images with my target in them. These images were all for a brand query.

            Example: image on mybrand.com named mybrand-imageName.png

            we were able to get most of those images to show up when doing an image search for mybrand

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • MichaelGregory
              MichaelGregory last edited by

              I'm going with "Google is too smart for that" on the transparent image alt text front. I guess it would help out people using a screen reader, but I'd like to get some of the images into Google image search. It seems like alt text is pretty much required to rank for that?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • erickcalderon
                erickcalderon last edited by

                I think that adding title to the div is the only way for you to do a background image in CSS.

                You can cheat a little by then loading a transparent image in the container that the background image is in, make this transparent image have an alt tag and title tag for whatever your background image is about.

                If you are doing this for seo purposes this should work, if you are doing it to have the html well formatted, there is only the div tag.

                Cheers!
                -Erick

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
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