Alt Tags on multiple product images
-
Hi
I work on SEO for an ecommerce site and wanted to find out how important it is to optimise all images with alt tags.
We have alt tags in place, however have not optimised descriptions for the following example images:
Front of cupboard
Back of cupboard
Side of cupboard etc
Is this dangerous for SEO if these images all have the same alt tag?
We have thousands of products so it would be a huge job to update these, but if it's crucial for SEO we can work through our priorities.
Thank you!
-
Yes I was thinking of testing this.
I have just checked our images and from what I can see the devs have set the alt tag to default to the product title.
Then the image title is a bit more descriptive - does the image title/legend help with anything or should we ignore these and update alt tags instead?
-
Sorry Becky, I forgot to say that without some level of testing, it is almost impossible to say with any degree of certainty just what you would get from this as a site-wide task. Depending on the products, searches conducted and how Google ranks the images, you may find a good deal of additional traffic or you may find very little.
Perhaps take a control group to test and monitor the products over the course of a month to see if sales / traffic has increased.
-Andy
-
Do you still not need to optimise each different image?
-
Thank you this is really helpful!
-
Great thank you very much for your help!
-
Hi Becky,
You aren't likely to be penalised for this, but the benefit you can derive from ALT text will be lessened. If the picture is of a floor fan, and the ALT tag says this, there is no problem.
However, I would be saying something like "Metal Blizzard Floor Fan 12" 55W with tilt". It will help because you have more of a chance of it turning up in image searches = more traffic.
-Andy
-
Definitely a great idea is there is a dev on hand to do this
-Andy
-
Hi Becky,
Completely agreed with Andy's suggestion.I would like to add one more thing here I'm also working on a large e-commerce site with thousands of products. I find a good way to insert alt tag very easily I asked web developer to create a module by which every products having alt tag with product name and web developer did a great job by writing only few lines of code. you can ask web developer to do the same.
Now I don't need to add alt tag individually on each product and it saves my time.
Hope this helps.
Thanks
-
Hi Andy
That's great thank you. I'm finding it harder to describe some products, which have very similar images. Say for instance, a fan at different angles.
Will I get penalised if Alt tags have the same name? So if say 3 images all have, floor fan? This is happening as a default at the moment, but I am looking into getting them updated - however if the benefit is small other tasks will be prioritised.
Thank you
-
Hi Becky,
What you need to be careful of, is over optimising with ALT tags. This can lead to issues, but what you suggest is correct. John Mueller from Google had this to say about ALT tags...
"alt attribute should be used to describe the image. So if you have an image of a big blue pineapple chair you should use the alt tag that best describes it, which is alt=”big blue pineapple chair.”** title attribute** should be used when the image is a hyperlink to a specific page. The title attribute should contain information about what will happen when you click on the image. For example, if the image will get larger, it should read something like, title=”View a larger version of the big blue pineapple chair image.”
If the image someone can click on is the rear view of a cupboard, then say this in the ALT tag. However, it is worthwhile remembering that you need to be descriptive with these.
Here is a great article on the subject.
-Andy
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
-
Product Tags
So Opencart allows the use of product tags (please note, this are NOT meta tags) which I believe are used for when customers want to search for a product using the search function. So one of my tags could be ''star wars socks'', and when a customer types this into the search it brings up every product containing the tag for socks. This is all good and well, however, these tags appear on the product page itself, right below the Manufacturer/Brand, and above the price. Will Google look kindly on this or could it be considered as keyword stuffing? Or will Google know they're for search and ignore them? I just need to know whether or not removing them entirely will be a good or bad idea.
On-Page Optimization | | moon-boots0 -
My website is being opened by multiple URLs?
Dear Friends, I have a website which is being opened like example.comand example/index to same page. Is there any problem SEO point of view. By the way I have placed the Rel= canonical tag in source page. its working fine but
On-Page Optimization | | docbeans0 -
Is there any benefit to removing brand name from the title tag?
I just signed up for Moz recently, and have noticed that in my crawl errors, I have hundreds of issues with my title tag being too long. My business is selling prints for landscape/travel/nature photography, and I've built these pages dynamically to where the title tag for pages selling individual photos has the title of the photo for sale followed by a hyphen and then the brand name. The same goes for gallery pages "Gallery Name | Brand Name". Would it be worth it to shorten the title tags by removing the brand name from these pages? Or will that actually harm more than help? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | shannmg10 -
How to Manage Comparison products website
Hi Mozzers I have been Working on a Comparison Website ; Where We are comparing Single products to many other Products with same specs. E.G : Product A vs Product B and Product A vs Product C ? How We can manage it So that WE donot have duplicate Content issues. Remember: Products are digital so cannot change much Content in there.
On-Page Optimization | | Asjad0 -
Are H1 tags important or influential?
We are in the process of correcting our site in hopes that Google will rank us higher in the SERP. We have many pages that have multiple H1 tags or no H1 tag at all. How important is the H1 tag? Will it help us increase our ranking on Google? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | WebRiverGroup0 -
H1 tag in the footer?
Quick question: I have been scouring SEOMoz.org along with webmaster forums looking for an answer, but we have a person who insists that the H1 tag be located in the Footer. I feel that is is fundamentally wrong because it is not the intent of the H1 tag, and I do not believe it is a best practice. That being said would we see what little value the H1 tag has disappear if we put it in the footer, would we be penalized, or am I being too vanilla by wanting to keep it in the Title position?
On-Page Optimization | | travelclickseo0 -
Links in header tags
Hello Seomozzers I have a query, is it good to have links in h2, h3, h4 tags. Does it have a positive factor over on page optimisation or a negative factor. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | usef4u0 -
Homepage vs. Product page competition
I think my homepage and basic product listing page may be competing.. We have a very old domain with lots of links w/ generic anchor text ( click here, etc. ) That page is http://mybrand.com which Google ranks for our "widgets" search term. We have a page http://ourbrand.com/widgets that lists the 5 or 6 basic widgets we sell. This page is indexed also, but doesn't have nearly as many links since it is new compared to the age of the domain. After reading this.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I I'm not really sure I can remove all "widgets" links from our homepage, since that's a core part of our site's menu / hierarchy. So maybe my best effort would be to reorganize the page so that the homepage focuses on Our Brand Name Widgets .. and let the product page focus on the widgets keyword. Is having those two pages serve to represent those two separate but similar keywords feasible? Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | minutiae0