Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hidden H1 Tag on Image
-
Hi,
In the page I'm working on, I encountered an
tag in an image, rather than in a text form.
Do you think it's an issue when it comes to SEO?
What do you suggest I should do if there is an issue?Keen to hear from you!
-
Short answer; I think you can get more value from an H1 tag, so its a small SEO issue.
However, it really depends what image you're talking about. Is this just a logo? If so it doesn't adequately describe page content in a way that people or search engines can understand. Regardless, putting that image in an H1 tag does nothing for the image.
H tags should display a hierarchy. As James mentions above, H1 tags should contain an editorial description of the page; a headline, this is best for usability (which trickles down to SEO impact).
Anecdotally I've found keywords in H1 tags to have greater sway over page relevance than keywords in body copy. They are certainly one of the areas I pay more attention to. Despite that, it's not unusual to find logos in H1 tags, especially on homepages. But I'd encourage you to consider putting that H1 tag around a keyword optimised mission statement/heading on your homepage instead. The logo can remain visually as prominent. Ranking for your companies name is rarely hard so why have the code focus on that?
What about standards? Well interstingly w3c uses img in an H1 tag. With an alt tag of "w3c". That will be machine readable, but not very helpful as a page heading. Then again w3c goes on to use h1 tag for its page titles as well thus committing the sin of multiple H1 tags. Only thing of relevance they say is that you can include HTML in an H1 tag, so one option is an image and text.
In summary;
- one H1 tag per page
- the right place in the hierarchy (with h2 etc)
- keyword optimised but not spammy/stuffy (for deeper pages consider long tail kewords)
- Short, descriptive and engaging text*
*for example mission statements should say who the website represents, what they do and why they're special. Ideally in less than 20 words; think snappy newspaper headline. Answer user intent!
-
It's an issue in that it's not correct.
A "header tag" is always text based. They are used to determine, to search engines, what a page is about. The search engines can't really "see" images in the traditional sense so this application is incorrect.
A lot of designers mistakenly wrap the logo in a H1 tag and call it a day. I call it out in audits all the time. It's just not correct or the best practice. It will have no effect for SEO or for image optimization in that format.
Your goal is always to communicate to users (and Google) what the page is about. The proper application of H1 tags is part of that process.
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
-
Why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster
Hi, I would like to ask why our website images not indexing in Google. I have shared the following screenshot of the search console. https://www.screencast.com/t/yKoCBT6Q8Upw Last week (Friday 14 Sept 2018) it was showing 23.5K out 31K were submitted and indexed by Google. But now, it is showing only 1K 😞 Can you please let me know why might this happen, why images are not getting indexed and showing in Google webmaster.
Technical SEO | | 21centuryweb0 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Images on sub domain fed from CDN
I have a client that uses a CDN to fill images, from a sub domain ( images.domain.com). We've made sure that the sub domain itself is not blocked. We've added a robots.txt file, we're creating an image sitemap file & we've verified ownership of the domain within GWT. Yet, any crawler that I use only see's the first page of the sub domain (which is .html) but none of the subsequent URL's which are all .jpeg. Is there something simple I'm missing here?
Technical SEO | | TammyWood0 -
Is alt text inside an img tag inside an h1 the same weight as text directly inside the h1?
Right now I use a background image and CSS to tie the h1 tag to my logo on each page. However, I am concerned that may not be best practice. Plus, I am interested in using schema markup on my logo. So, my question is, if I use an image with alt text inside my h1 tag, will the alt text carry as much weight as a text-based h1?
Technical SEO | | Avalara0 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Div tags vs. Tables
Is there any reason NOT to code in tables (other than it being outdated) for SEO reasons?
Technical SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Hiding H1 with background colour
Will the H1 tag be visible to the bot if it is hidden from the human eyes using background color. Will Google penalize my website if I hide the H1 tag using the background color so it is visible to the search engine bot but not visible to the human eye. If I place the H1 tag in the footer (front-end location) for the human eye but at the top of the page in HTML for the bots, will the search bot still consider this as the H1 tag and rank it accordingly Finally will you categorize this under blackhat ( I think it is not too sure)
Technical SEO | | YvonneMartin0 -
How many strong tags is too many
Hi everyone, just a quick question, what are your views on the use of strong tags in content? how many is too many? What is you have strong tags around every keywords for a sentance etc?
Technical SEO | | pauledwards1