Can you use the image description for IMG ALT?
-
ello ello!
We're running an ecommerce site with thousands of products. None of the product pages have an IMG ALT.
We're been thinking about an IMG ALT rule to apply to all product page images. Every image currently has a detailed caption so the thought was, why don't we use the description as the IMG ALT? It's perfect as it explains the image.
Now the thing is, the length of the description, some of them come to 150 - 200 characters with spaces. Do you think this is too much?
Also, would having a caption and the IMG ALT be the same cause issues?
Have you guys employed any rules for IMG ALT in a bulk way?
-
I would also encourage you to keep visually impaired users in mind, as alt-img tags (and contextual text) are how they determine what an image is. The screen reader skips over blank alt-img tags, and reads all others out loud.
-
The rule should be naming the image files in a descriptive way, i.e.: "View from the room of the apartment in name of the street" (sorry, using real estate example, but working on a site in that niche with the same problem), and than using the name of the file both a title img and alt text.
The alt text would be surely shorter than the caption, also because it is quite normal to trying been short in files' names.
-
You are right. You can not have the same product name for all images. That would be bad too. Some sites simply use the image name. If there are hyphens in the image name, then some Javascript can take care of that and you would have some decent ALT tags. But then the images should have good file names in the first place. If the names makes no sense than they would make no sense as the ALT tags too.
There is no easy way to apply bulk rules to images in ecommerce sites.
-
Whilst I can see you are looking to gain SEO advantage in your use of ALT text, your primary consideration should always be for the end user: If this image does not display, does the ALTernative text explain what was there?
You should be testing this with a text browser, or an emulator, to make sure it still makes sense.
Taking this approach should yield the best results.
-
I thought that too but what if you have numerous images promoting a product? Can't have:
- product name (an a unique identifier) for image 1
- product name (an a unique identifier) for image 2
- product name (an a unique identifier) for image 3
Wouldn't it look spammy to have numerous images on a product page with the same keyword as the title?
In my view, images on a product page should enhance the product, they should demonstrate the product in action to further incentivise the customer to go "aha..this is a great product."
For example a product like a shovel would have images showing the shovel in usage.
This is why I thought the description would work as it describes the image, is unique and features the product name. But yeah, it's the length that concerns me.
-
Yes, 150-200 words in the image ALT tag would be considered spammy and you may get some sort of penalty.
I recommend having the product name as the image ALT.
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
-
We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
Hello, We have a series of sites and one, in particular, has around 75,000 (20%) monthly users from the USA, but we don't currently offer them anything as our site is aimed at the UK market. The site is a .com and though we own the .co.uk the .com is the primary domain. We have had a lot of success moving other sites to have the .co.uk as the primary domain for UK traffic. However, in this case, we want to keep both the UK traffic and the US traffic and if we split it into two sites, only one can win right? What could do? It would be cool to have a US version of our site but without affecting traffic too much. On the other sites, we simply did 301 redirects from the .com page to the corresponding .co.uk page. Any ideas?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AllAboutGroup0 -
Can a Self-Hosted Ping Tool Hurt Your IP?
Confusing title I know, but let me explain. We are in the middle of programming a lot of SEO "action" tools for our site. These will be available for users to help better optimize their sites in SERPs. We were thinking about adding a "Ping" tool based in PHP so users can ping their domain and hopefully get some extra attention/speed up indexing of updates. This would be hosted on a subdomain of our site. My question is: If we get enough users using the product, could that potentially get us blacklisted with Google, Bing etc? Technically it needs to send out the Ping request, and that would be coming from the same IP address that our main site is hosted on. If we end up getting over a 1000 users all trying to send ping requests I don't want to potentially jeopardize our IP. Thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | David-Kley0 -
What tools do you use to find scraped content?
This hasn’t been an issue for our company so far, but I like to be proactive. What tools do you use to find sites that may have scraped your content? Looking forward to your suggestions. Vic
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | VicMarcusNWI0 -
Can anyone explain some below SEO questions ?
Can we do link building like directory, article, press releases, classifieds, business listing, social bookmarking etc. We need to check DA, Alexa, Page Rank, cBlock IP before publishing any kind of Link but how much Max or Min. no. should be for consider any website like DA should be min 20-30-40 etc.. How can consider a natural links? Which type anchor text should be in any kind of links may be directory etc. In website interlinking we should put Exact Links or no need to put any links For.ex.my website is abc.com.au then we can put link for Website Design keywords or Should be long tail keyword. How can we do content marketing means we should post blog in internal website or need to create External Blog like BlogSpot, WordPress. In blog we should put any keyword link OR should be post without links. We can put link on no follow website. Why more website coming on Google first page but they are doing Spammy links like exact keywords links, unnatural links etc.. Thanks, Akhilesh
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | dotlineseo0 -
Can one business operate under more than one website?
Is it possible for a business to rank organically for the same keyword multiple times with different web addresses? Say if I sell car keys and I wanted to rank for "buy new car keys" and I set up two different website say ibuycarkeys.com and carkeycity.com and then operate under both of these, would Google frown upon this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | steve2150 -
How can I tell if my site was penalized from the most recent penguin update?
Hey all, I want to be able to see if my website was penalized from the most recent penguin update because we have several hundred websites built and at the bottom of each on it says something along the lines Website by, Web Design by, Hosting by and links back to our homepage. Could this possibly be penalizing us since these links have similar anchor text and on sites that have nothing to do with our services? Thanks, Ryan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
What on-page/site optimization techniques can I utilize to improve this site (http://www.paradisus.com/)?
I use a Search Engine Spider Simulator to analyze the homepage and I think my client is using black hat tactics such as cloaking. Am I right? Any recommendations on to improve the top navigation under Resorts pull down. Each of the 6 resorts listed are all part of the Paradisus brand, but each resort has their own sub domain.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Melia0