Image Tags And Titles
-
Hi,
I am currently revamping my website with a new look. Some questions i have with regards to the images found on a page.
- I know that we need an alt tag for each image. This should not be keyword spammed. However, what about the title tag for the image?
What is the best practice for image title tags? Should it be the same as the alt tag? Should it be different? Should I leave it blank?
- If I am running a wordpress platform for my website. The defaulted settings for wordpress is that all images inside a post are clickable. When clicked, the page loads from abcdef.com/page/ to abcdef.com/page/image.jpg.
This seems to be generating alot of internal links but I don't see the value of loading an image when my visitors click on that. Should I let the image be clickable or remove the link on the image for best SEO practices?
Thanks for your advice.
paul
-
That's a good rule of thumb from Brett Collins, though I typically make the alt attribute (technically it's an attribute to an image "tag" rather than a tag in and of itself, but it's just a semantics thing) descriptive of the image instead of the post - often it's the same thing either way. I know some people, myself included much of the time, who don't even use the title attribute unless it is within the href tag of a linking image. I know others who use it as the actual title of the image (e.g. funnydog.jpg would be "funny dog" and cats-are-evil.png would be "cats are evil"). I do typically make the alt and title attributes of an image two different things. I disable the creation of image attachment pages in Wordpress. When inserting individual images, ensure that the Link is set to File Url. When inserting a gallery, ensure that "Link thumbnails to" is set to Image File. You can also find plugins that will redirect the attachment pages. I typically block those in the robots.txt file too.
-
Generally I use the title tag to tell people what is in the pic, if it's a picture of a funny dog I call it "funny dog". The alt tag can be a bit more general and should say what the article itself is about. without necessarily using a keyword, (though it can contain the keyword). So if the article is about pet food in London, the alt tag could be "London pet food" or Great pet food London" or some variant on that.
Personally I usually don't make my images clickable.
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
-
Nofollow Meta Tag
Hello, I'm new to this forum so please forgive if this has been discussed before. I have a question about the nofollow meta tag being used at the page level. We have external links within our website's guest blog pages that we do not want followed. I would use a nofollow rel attribute on the link itself, but since we allow the blog to be posted using a wysiwyg-type text editor, that proves to be a little difficult to enforce. I was thinking about using the nofollow meta tag at the page level to handle this, but was a little unsure on how that may affect our own links...such as menu and side-bar links...that are on those pages. I'm not too concerned about those internal links not being followed on those particular blog pages, but I wanted to make sure a nofollow for a link on one page won't have any negative side effects on those same menu links that appear on various other pages without the nofollow meta tag. Would there be any negative side effects to using the nofollow meta tag like that? Thanks in advance for any insight. Best Regards, Ken
On-Page Optimization | | kens1090 -
How many hyphens are allowed in page titles or image names?
When I was going through certification, I was told it should be limited to one or two. I was curious if there is a change.
On-Page Optimization | | SeobyKP0 -
Colons in title tag?
Does Google view the colon as a keyword separator like it does with the pipe (|) character? Currently, our site automatically constructs the title tag based on the page name given by the user. Long ago, we started using the colon character to visually separate the brand & model of the product from the size, and as a result, all of our title tags have been constructed this way. This was done more to make it easier to read for humans than for search engines. My question is - should I consider getting rid of the colon from our title tags? To give more info, our website sells tires. So, for any given model of tire, there might be 25-100 different individual sizes. The tags are constructed as follows: (brand)(model) : (size). Here's an example from our site: GENERAL ALTIMAX ARCTIC : 225/45R17 91Q The brand is General Tire, the model is the Altimax Arctic and the size is 225/45R17 91Q Since this entire string really constitutes the full product name, should I remove the colon so that Google views it that way? Or, since I have used a colon instead of a pipe, will Google simply ignore it and treat the entire string as one keyword phrase?
On-Page Optimization | | kcourtem0 -
2 canonical tags on the same page
When using the 'on-page optimizer' tool, I continue to get the same recommendation on every page to only use 1 canonical tag on the page. I'm not sure why there are 2 tags on each page in the first place so I don't know how to remove the one that's not needed. Our site is on a WP blog and a sample page to view the source code would be: http://www.shilohstreet.com/blog/is-flipping-houses-smart-real-estate-investing.html Does anyone know why this is happening, how to fix it and/or if I should even be concerned with it? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | shilohstreet0 -
Canonical tag for home page
This question was asked before but I didn't see a clear answer to it. If I've got a site that has as it's home page: http://www.mysite.com/, and there are many references within the site back to the home page that point to /index.php, should I include a canonical tag in the index.php page like this: to avoid a duplicate content issue, and to have all juice from both links combined into one?
On-Page Optimization | | wcksmith0 -
My blog title is getting added to my post title and I can't figure out how to remove it
Hello everyone, I am sure most of you guys know how to do this. I am finding that when my posts are listed in google, my blog title is added to my post title. 2 questions. 1. Is this hurting my rankings because the blog title is diluting my keywords making it look like I have a huge title? (the on page optimizer is dinging me for this. 2. I use a self hosted wordpress blog with the all in one seo plugin. Does anyone know how to remove the blog title from being appended to the post title? I thought I could do that in all in one seo by checking the rewrite title box and just having it say %post_title% but that didn't fix it. Also it was doing it before I checked that box as well. Any other ideas to try? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | FastLearner0 -
Why does SEOmoz use /blog/content-title vs /category/content-title? Any difference?
Assume a brand new blog being designed and all other things equal. What are the pros & cons between using the url structure /blog/content-title vs. /category/content-title? Note:
On-Page Optimization | | JasonJackson
Both scenarios would be using categorical archiving.0 -
H1 tags the same on all pages - problem?
I generally use wordpress as a CMS and have the H1 tag coded in the header.php include file. This results as it being the same in all page - I normally do something like Keyword - Company name and set the company logo as the background and move the text off screen using text indent (CSS). Is having the same on every page a bad thing? I might be tricky to change so their all unique.
On-Page Optimization | | JamesJacobs0