Image Tags And Titles

[paulgian]

Hi,

I am currently revamping my website with a new look. Some questions i have with regards to the images found on a page.

1. 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?

2. 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

[Everett]

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.

[BrettCollins]

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.