Probably basic, but how to use image Title and Alt Text - and confusing advice from Moz!
-
I've been doing SEO on my business's site for years and have got good results. I've always used image Titles and Alt Text text. Our blog posts are image-intensive, often with 100-200 pictures (not surprising since we're photographers). For any given blog post, I've tended to have a uniform image Title for each image and then a more specialised Alt Text tag giving a description.
A typical image on one of our blog posts would be like this:
Image filename: wedding-photography-at-so-and-so-venue-001.jpg .... 002, 003 etc
Image Title Attribute: Wedding Photography at So-And-So-Venue by Our-Company-Name - this would be the same for every image in the blog post.
Alternative Text: Bride and groom exchanging vows during wedding ceremony at so-and-so-venue - this would be tailed for each image.
So my question is - is this right? The Moz help page for image SEO is actually incorrect in one aspect:
https://moz.com/ugc/10-tips-for-optimizing-your-images-for-search
"Alt text (short for “alternative text”) is used to highlight the identity of an image when you hover over it with your mouse cursor. It also shows as text to all users when there are problems rendering the image."
This is not the case. Hovering over the image in Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Opera ALL display the Image Title, NOT Alt Text.
Thoughts?
-
OK that's good to know. We do inadvertently have a lot of our pics on GI so I was obviously doing something right all these years.
Thanks
-
That Moz help page is kinda half-right
For many browsers, in the absence of a title attribute, they will display the alt text on hover instead. But if a title attribute is declared, it will be used, as you note.
Keep in mind - image title attributes are not used as ranking factors for regular search, but they are used as ranking factors for Google Image Search. So still well worth optimising them if your site benefits from image search specifically (as a good photographer's site likely would).
Paul
-
Yes, I've taken that very approach with a re-write this afternoon. if the venue is relevant to the picture then I've left it in, otherise I've removed it from Alt but kept in Title. I've changed up the Title tags too so they're in blocks - first for this place, then this place, then this place etc rather than them all having a global value. It's probably a bit more balance now.
Thanks for the replies. Moz do need to correct that help page.
-
To me that sounds pretty good, providing it is relevant to to the image and provides genuine context it should be fine, I would however, consider - "wedding ceremony at venue" borderline - especially if it is in every image alt on a page. Try change it up a touch - if you cannot tell from the picture that it is at specific venue then maybe not have it in there, say for pictures with a shallow depth of field and the background is not easily identifiable, rings, flowers, tables placings, closeups and a like.
-
Yes, I'm wary of 'keyword stuffing' but I'm not sure what would actually constitute that.
If I've got : " Bride and groom exchanging vows during wedding ceremony at so-and-so-venue "... then that venue name is going to get mentioned in most images - after that is where the image was taken and is completely relevant. Would that be considered stuffing? It's difficult to judge what is and what isn't.
-
I believe what you are doing for your Alt text is great - make it describe each image individually.
As for title I would use it to further describe each individual image rather than duplicate for all in the blog post imagery. This is mainly used for further improving UX on each image.
Alt text is the most important from an crawling/seo perspective as is often used in collaboration with the surrounding text to determine context. Be wary of keyword stuffing in your alt tags.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Images are not indexing as they are in temporary ads and when the ads expired we redirect the ad image to the parent category
As we are a classified ads site, our ads expire after some time,and we redirect 301 the ad post page to the parent category And images urls in the ad page is redirected to, so they are not getting index in google image..what is the best solution for getting image index in this situation: 301 redirect images Keep images And so more?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | divar0 -
Image impressions fall drastically
Hi everyone, On June 15th, 2015 we saw a huge drop(70%) in image impressions and clicks for website: http://www.zakoopi.com/ What can be the possible reason for that? Please let me know what can be done to improve the impressions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Images Sitemap GWT - not indexed?
So we went ahead and created an image sitemap of 2387 images, one for each product - I was hoping it would give us better exposure in image results. No joy, over 7 days and they only showing as "sent" but not "indexed". Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Novice Question - Can Browsers realistically distinguish words within concatenated strings e.g. text55fun or should one use text-55-fun? What about foreign languages especially more obscure ones like Finnish which Google Translate often miss-translates?
I am attempting to understand what is realistically possible within Google, Yahoo and Bing as they search websites for KeyWords. Technically my understanding is that they should be able to distinguish common words within concatenated strings, although there can be confusion between word boundaries when ambiguity is involved. So in the simple example of text55fun, do search engines actually distinguish text, 55 and fun separately? There are practical processing, databased and algorithm limitations that might turn a technically possible solution into a unrealistic one at a commercial scale. What about more ambiguous strings like stringsstrummingstrongly would that be parsed as string s strummings trongly or strings strummings trongly or strings strumming strongly? Does one need to use dashes or underscores to make it unambiguous to the search engine? My guess is that the engine would recognize the dash or space and better understand the word boundaries yet ignore the dash or underscore from an overall concatenated string perspective. Thanks in advance to whoever can provide any insight to an old coder who is new to this field.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ny600 -
Similar page titles but not quite duplicate
Howdy Mozzers, I have a problem with the way Google now tries not to show more than one search result per site on the first page. As in it is a lot harder to be ranked number 1 - 10 twice with different pages. Some of my pages have similar yet different page titles so they use the same first two keywords and then a variable such as '(keyword) (keyword) installations' '(keyword) (keyword) surveys'. Then when I search for '(keyword) (keyword)' they all appear at the start of page two with only ever one of them moving onto the end of page one. Now, it could just be that they are not quite optimised for page 1 but I think it would be more holding back of pages so they don't flood page 1. Any help on this? And also is there a problem with having similar page titles for pages? Cheers
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Hughescov0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
New, Used, Refurbished Ecommerce Products
I'm in a situation where I am trying to improve an ecommerce site that sells about 10-15 products, and a few variations of each. My main headache is coming from the fact that we sell New, used, and refurbished products that are often overlapping. I'm not really sure if I am categorizing the products/structuring the site the best possible way. Here is an example that shows the current structure of the site: New Fruits
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | heroiceric
--> Bananas
----> Banana Model 1
----> Banana Model 2
--> Apples
----> Apple Model 1
----> Apple Model 2
--> Oranges
----> Orange Model 1
----> Orange Model 2 Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas
----> Refurbished Banana
--> Apples
----> Refurbished Apple
--> Oranges
----> Refurbished Orange The business, however, specializes in the refurbished models because they make significantly more money for each one that is sold. Because of this, it's way more important to get the refurbished models ranking up for the terms. I've been struggling to get good results from my SEO efforts and I think that this strange site structure could be holding me back. Would it make sense for me to use canonical on the "New Fruits" pages, pointing toward the "Refurbished Fruits" pages? Should I be trying to build links to the category pages or the actual product pages. IE: To "Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas" rather than "Refurbished Fruits --> Bananas --> Refurbished Banana?"0 -
Importance of text above the fold
I am being advised by an SEO that each page of my ecommerce site must have a significant block of unique text "above the fold" to do well in Google post-Panda. This recommendation is at odds with what my design/usability/conversion people want to see. The current site design features eye-catching graphics just below the header and goes right into product listings, with SEO text near the bottom of the page. How important is it to have SEO text near the top of a page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mhkatz0