ALT TAGS for SEO - whats the latest recommendation?
-
ALT Tags used strategically have always been a part of my SEO recommendations (relevant, under 7 words, not keyword stuffed but focused on primary page keyword). I have been getting mixed views on updates that search engines don't use them anymore in ranking determination. The Q&A on this subject was last addressed in 2011, what is the most recent approach on this?
-
They're still relevant, especially for image search. I'd change one thing in your strategy though...
From "focused on primary page keyword"
to
"focused on describing the image"
Assuming you're using images relevant to the topic you can do both, but when you have to make a choice between those two choose the latter.
-
I agree with what Schwaab said. Alt tags alone are not going to significantly affect your rankings. However, think of them from an accessibility standpoint. If a user is using a screen scraper to view your page or browsing without images enabled, the alt text is the only piece of information they have to observe what would have been portrayed through the image. Since search engines have always been about giving the users the best experience, there is reason to believe that having accurate alt tags for your images can help rankings in a way other than just keyword stuffing.
Hope this helps,
Chris Wilson
-
I think alt tags are still relevant. It's another way of helping Google identify what a page is about. Are a few alt tags alone going to make or break your rankings? Probably not, but it doesn't hurt to optimize what you can.
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
-
How do you optimize a blog post for SEO after the RankBrain?
Hi Guys Just curious to hear what you guys do to rank blog posts in the top in Google especially onsite, after the RankBrain update? Do you still use SEO tools to optimize this or are the SEO tools outdated for this? If yes which tools do you use to get success with? Cheers John
Algorithm Updates | | igniterman750 -
SEO Value for Visitor Comments on WordPress Blog
Hi all, I was wondering what SEO value, if any, there is from user comments on my WordPress blog. A lot of them seem to be from bots or incredibly generic. So I guess, aside from possibly adding to the 'trust' factor and the possibility of facilitating a potential relationship with another relevant website, is there any value here? I can't wait to hear from you all!
Algorithm Updates | | maxcarnage0 -
Ecommerce - SEO Quick Wins?
Hi I wanted to find out if anyone had any quick wins for an ecommerce site & SEO. I am the only SEO and we have a small online team and an ecommerce site with thousands of product pages. It's impossible to optimise everything, and we have taken the top 100 products and optimised them - starting from scratch with keyword research. I'm now struggling to prioritize what we need next - I know we need better internal linking, content, social and lots more, but this isn't something I can get through alone. I need a starting point and perhaps something with a quick win initially? Thanks 🙂
Algorithm Updates | | BeckyKey0 -
How Additional Characters and Numbers in URL affect SEO
Hi fellow SEOmozers, I noticed that a lot of websites have additional characters and words at the end of the URL in addition keyword optimized URL. Mostly for E-Commerce sites For example: www.yoursite.com/category/keyword?id=12345&Keyword--Category--cm_jdkfls_dklj or wwww.yoursite.com/category/keyword#83939=-37292 My question is how does the additional characters or parameters(not necessarily tracking parameters) affect SEO? Does it matter if i have additional keywords in the additional stuff in the URL (1st url example)? If you can provide more information, that would be helpful. Thank you!
Algorithm Updates | | TommyTan0 -
Schema tags demystified
I am looking for a basic description of the use for schema tags and how and in what circumstances they are best applied. I have found a few resources such as schema.org and here on this forum, but find I still need a basics lesson and subsequently, some ways to execute. The Raven plugin appears to make the code visible to the viewer which seems unacceptable...Guess I'm just a bit stumped! Thanks in advance for any available hand-holding on this. ;o)
Algorithm Updates | | gfiedel0 -
Climate of fear in the world of SEO
There certainly appears to be a certain climate of fear about backlinks at the mo, and not without reason. I was wondering why Google moved from simply discounting links to punishing site owners for their backlink profiles, many of which were built up when the risks of punishment weren't there? I mean, I could send them the names of at least 1,000 sites in linkfarms / blog rings - you name it. I'm sure most of us on here could do the same. Responding to the whims of Google is such a waste of time and resources. Why doesn't Google simply choose a direction and stick with it? What is their strategy exactly?
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0 -
Should I use canonical tags on my site?
I'm trying to keep this a generic example, so apologies if this is too vague. On my main website, we've always had a duplicate content issue. The main focus of our site is breaking down to specific, brick and mortar locations. We have to duplicate the description of product/service for every geographic location (this is a legal requirement). So for example, you might have the parent "product/service" page targeting the term, and then 100's of sub pages with "product/service San Francisco", "product/service Austin", etc. These pages have identical content except for the geographic location is dynamically swapped out. There is also additional useful content like google map of area, local resources, etc. As I said this was always seen as an SEO issue, specifically you could see in the way that googlebot would crawl pages and how pagerank flowed through the site that having 100's of pages with identical copy and just swapping out the geographic location wasn't seen as good content, however we still always received traffic and conversions for the long tail geographic terms so we left it. Las year, with Panda, we noticed a drop in traffic and thought it was due to this duplicate issue so I added canonical tags to all our geographic specific product/service pages that pointed back to the parent page, that seemed to be received well by google and traffic was back to normal in short order. However, recently what I notice a LOT in our SERP pages is if I type in a geographic specific term, i.e. "product/service san francisco", our deep page with the canonical tag is what google is ranking. Google inserts its own title tag on the SERP page and leaves the description blank as it doesn't index the page due to the canonical tag on the page. Essentially what I think it is rewarding is the site architecture which organizes the content to the specific geo in the URL: site.com/service/location/san-francisco. Other than that there is no reason for it to rank that page. Sorry if this is lengthy, thanks for reading all of that! Essentially my question is, should I keep the canonical tags on the site or take them off since Google insists on ranking the page? If I am ranking already then the potential upside to doing that is ranking higher (we're usually in the 3-6 spot on the result page) and also higher CTR because we can get a description back on our resulting page. The counter argument is I'm already ranking so leave it and focus on other things. Appreciate your thoughts on this!
Algorithm Updates | | edu-SEO0 -
Keyword density and meta tags
Hi, I've just checked the number of keywords appearing on my website's pages. On some of them the keyword density was way too high (7-10%) if you included the meta tags, but all under 3.5% if I didn't include the keywords and description meta tags. So my question is - when looking at number of keywords used per page, do I have to worry about what's in those meta tags? Do the keywords in there count towards keyword density / number of keywords per page? Thanks, Luke
Algorithm Updates | | McTaggart0