Image Alt and Title?
-
I'm building a quotations website. Each quotation will have between 1 and 5 images (picture quotes) associated with it. The images will be featured as thumbnails (image gallery) on the quote post itself.
How should I handle the image alt and title tags so that I rank better for a quote in image search, and also strengthen the ranking signals on the quote post itself?
Take for example, a photo of a beach and a photo of the sun. Both have the same quote on it: "Laughter is an instant vacation." Should the quote itself go into the alt tag? while the description of the image goes into the title? Or should the quote go into the title? Would this be correct?
Title: Beach with children playing in the sand.
Alt: "Laughter is an instant vacation."
Title: Sun shining in the sky.
Alt: "Laughter is an instant vacation."
What about if the quote is very long? Google has said they like when the alt and title tags are short.
-
My bad. I thought since you said it was a full-time job for you that money was somehow involved.
-
Jim,
A few notes:
1. This a simple quotations website. Not an e-commerce site in any way.
2. I do not have 15 or more employees.
3. I don't own a billion-dollar company.
4. I will have functional alt tags, whether or not someone thinks they're perfect or not.
What does all of this mean?
A) I wouldn't be worth anyone's time in court.
B) Even if a case was presented, a judge would laugh hysterically... because there is no case.
I can guarantee you I will never... ever, be sued for not having the correct alt tags on my images.
-
I hate to push back on this, but making a site accessible for the disabled is not considered "volunteer work" ... it's the law. The Americans With Disabilities Act requires businesses who make their services available to the public to make "reasonable accommodations" so that disabled members of the community can access their services. Those requirements apply to websites.
And if you think you can just ignore them, wait until someone sues you for an ADA violation (or several). Like it or not, if you're selling to the public, then you are a "public accommodation" and bound by the law. Consider it part of what you have to do to run a public business.
Here's a resource about ADA accessibility requirements and websites:
-
Jim,
The problem with that is Google has said it doesn't like long alt text. And we're only using a simple 5 word quote for this example. Imagine a quote that's 30 words, or longer... in addition to the description of the image itself.
And while I'm all for the visually impaired person getting a better user experience, I'm more concerned about my website being successful. This is a full-time job for me, not volunteer work.
-
I think you are so focused on SEO that you're losing the purpose of what the ALT tag is for. The ALT tag is to operate as a "stand-in" for the actual image. This is part of making your site friendly for people with disabilities, such as vision impairment. Someone comes to your website, and they can't "see" the image, they mouse over the image and the screen reader reads the text to them. What is going to be more useful to them?
ALT="A picture of sun shining in the sky and a quote: 'Laughter is an instant vacation.'"
OR
ALT="Laughter is an instant vacation"
Which does the best job telling the visually impaired person what is appearing on the screen?
Jim
-
One more possibility is to take an excerpt of the quote, maybe the first 10 words or so.
Title: Quote from Milton Berle
Alt: "I have never in my life learned anything from any..."
But that would still leave me with duplicate title tags across multiple images.
-
Another option would be to just add "Quote from Albert Einstein" in the alt tag, and then a description of the image itself in the title. For example:
Title: Beach with children playing in the sand.
Alt: Quote from Milton Berle
The only problem I see here is that first, the quote itself isn't included anywhere in the image, so if someone is searching for that quote on image search, it's not going to show up. Additionally, there could potentially be dozens of images on my site (and on the same page) with the same exact alt tag.
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
-
Wordpress: Why do the URLs of my posts keep changing to match the posts titles?
I'll try to keep this brief. The URLs of my posts keep snapping back to exactly match their post titles, no matter how often I try to change them. e.g. title: How to Tie Your Shoelaces desired URL: tie-shoelaces BUT actual URL: how-to-tie-your-shoelaces Anyone come across/ resolved this issue before?
On-Page Optimization | | GerardAdlum0 -
Background Images and ALT text
We pretty much exclusively use background images for our sites. How do I add in alt text? I tried a Google search for this issue and the best answer I could find was "Use the 'title' tag in the containing div", but that was from 2010. Is there a better way to do it? And no, we're not going to switch to using standard images, because background images are way more slick for UX.
On-Page Optimization | | MichaelGregory0 -
Is this (title) keyword stuffing?
"Animated Explainer Videos by Wick Video" "Video" is used twice. Could this hurt us?
On-Page Optimization | | WickVideo0 -
Duplicate meta and title in Google Webmaster Tools not updated?
Our canonical tags were removed by mistake for some time and our duplicate meta and title warnings in Google webmaster tools html improvements went up. We fixed the issue a week ago. I made sure the sitemap is picking up the canonical URL. Still the number went up after we fixed it (from around 5000 to around 7000 now) but when I click on details, it shows around 2000 in detail page. How long does it take for Google to update this? RB
On-Page Optimization | | rbai0 -
Image naming best practices?
While I have found many good sources of information for naming images for SEO purposes, I'm having trouble finding an up-to-date, exhaustive and authoritative source for image names, alt tags, etc. For instance... Max characters for image name? Max hyphens? How descriptive should you be? "ice-cream-flavors-icon_._jpg" or "ice-cream-flavors.jpg" or simply "ice-cream.jpg" How similar should the image name, alt text and page title be? At what point are you overusing a keyword? Rules to follow? So much more, but you get the idea! Anyone have a good reference or an answer to all things related to images and SEO? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | OSD0 -
Phone #s in title tag
Good, bad, or doesn't affect local SEO? Same question for youtube videos. love this place - thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | Superflys0 -
Page titles and descriptions
A website has several wigets to show Each wiget with its own page The wigets mostly just vary in size How would you suggest titles be done? Example: Wiget 1ft Wiget 2ft Wiget 3 ft an so on........ Would this trigger a duplicate content issue given “Wiget” leads in the page title?
On-Page Optimization | | APICDA0 -
How do you see a list of URLs with duplicate page titles?
When looking at the Duplicate Page Title report, the Other URLs column has various numbers that presumably indicate the number of pages that share the same title. When I click on one of these numbers, say a URL that shows 4 in that column, the next page reports "No sample duplicate URLs to report". Why isn't it showing me the other 3 URLs with the same page title?
On-Page Optimization | | jkenyon0