Image Alt tags--always include the targeted keyword?
-
Question for all the SEO's out there. Do you always include your target keyword in the image alt tag?
For example, if you had an article on osteoarthritis, and you included a photo of an old man, would you put "old man on a bench" or "old man suffering from osteoarthritis" -- even though you have no idea if the old man suffers from osteoarthritis?
-
Related-ish question:
I have a site-wide banner on a website with a theme related to mine with the alt tag containing an exact-match keyword.
It's on 2,500 pages. Post-Penguin, am I inviting trouble? Should I play it safe and have it on, say, just a handful of pages -- or even just the homepage?
-
As a photographer in a past life, what I did that did not work was use the same tag on every image in a post. That doesn't work.
What does work is variety. Use the keyword, use related words, and use descriptive image words. Say you had 3 images to keyword:
(image of an older guy on a bench) alt="osteoarthritis frequently affects elderly men"
(doctor, any health image) alt="healthy screenings can help reduce the symptoms of osteoarthritis"
(drug you're selling) alt="prevent joint pain and reduce osteoarthritis symptoms with X"
-
Agree with Davinia 100%. Write alt tags for the user - how would you BEST describe the image in a few words? I try to include a few keywords/phrases but if I have a page with 10 images I'm not going to include the same keyword(s) in every single image - probably around 50-80% of the images.
-
I would use the keyword in a keyword phrase and limit to 2-3 words, so something like "Man with osteoarthritis" or "Osteoarthritis affects everyone".
Remember alt tags are also used for usability, so if someone say has a computer that reads them the on-page content (e.g. a visually impaired person) you want your content to clearly and accurately explain what's on the page.
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
-
Setting up the right Geo targeting/language targeting settings and not to brake the SEO
Hello the great Moz Community! Gev here from BetConstruct, a leading gaming and betting software provider in the world. Our company website is performing great on SERP. We have 20+ different dedicated pages for our 20+ softwares, event section, different landing pages for different purposes. We also run a blog section, Press section, and more... Our website's default language is EN. 4 months ago we opened the /ru and /es versions of the website! I have set the correct hreflang tags, redirects, etc.. generated correct sitemaps, so the translated versions started to rank normally! Now our marketing team is requesting different stuff to be done on the website and I would love to discuss this with you before implementing! There are different cases! For example: They have created a landing page under a url betconstruct.com/usa-home and want me to set that page as the default website page(ie homepage), if the user visits our website from a US based IP. This can be done in 2 different ways: I can set the /usa-home page as default in my CMS, in case the visitor is from US and the address will be just betconstruct.com(without /use-home). In this case the same URL (betconstruct.com) will serve different content for only homepage. I can check the visitor IP, if he is from US, I can redirect him to betconstruct.com/usa-home. In this case user can click on the logo and go to the homepage betconstruct.com and see the original homepage. Both of the cases seems to be dangerous, because in the 1st case I am not sure what google will think when he sees different homepage from different IPs. And in the 2nd case I am not sure what should be that redirection. Is it 301 or 303, 302, etc... Because Google will think I don't have a homepage and my homepage redirects to a secondary page like /usa-home After digging a lot I realised that my team is requesting from me a strange case. Because the want both language targeting(/es, /ru) and country targeting (should ideally be like /us), but instead of creating /us, they want it to be instead of /en(only for USA) Please let me know what will be the best way to implement this? Should we create a separate version of our website for USA under a /us/* URLs? In this case, is it ok to have /en as a language version and /us as a country targeting? What hreflangs to use? I know this is a rare case and it will be difficult for you to understand this case, but any help will be much appreciated! Thank you! Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | betconstruct
Gev0 -
Keep ranking homepage for target keyword, or switch to another page?
Hi Moz Community! I've researched Moz to find the answer to this question but nothing for my situation. I'm hoping some experienced SEOs can help me out. Here's the situation: I'm up against some fairly stiff competition for my main keyword - the front page is dominated by major manufacturers with high brand recognition and loads of money, where as my client is a much smaller manufacturer trying to compete. However, their DA is only 37-53 so not impossible to outrank... just many links and a significant advantage. We've honed in on a keyword that still drives good traffic, that's a great term to drive paying customers, and that we can get competitive with. My strategy was to attempt to rank my client's _homepage _for this term, rather than a specific product page, as I knew that they'd have many more links and social shares of their main site. (I've been successful with this strategy before). We've risen 60+ positions for the keyword in the past 3 months, to position 12, but we seem to have plateaued for the past month. We're ranking in top 5 positions for a number of our other keywords, so I know we're trending well. However, I'm concerned that despite our quick rise to #12, I may have made a seemingly fatal decision to rank their homepage for our target keyword term. After we had plateaued for a while, I did a more thorough side by side comparison and found that 8 out of 10 competitors on the front page have 2 main things we don't (and can't, because we're ranking the homepage)... 1- The keyword in the url (they're ranking for product pages, i.e. homepage.com/keyword-here/) 2- Their keyword comes first, or early in the meta title. Ours is _supposed to _, but as you know- Google can do what it likes with your homepage title as it's your brand, so they've put our company name- _then _the keyword we added in the title. e.g. Our Company | The Term We're Ranking For We've done a lot of work, and gained many reputable, high quality links, and we did see a significant rank increase across all our pages. My question is- did I shoot myself in the foot? Or is ranking the homepage still viable in this situation? If ultimately this is going to be impossible to get in the top #5 spots, what can I do to fix it? We've already gained a PA of 38 on the homepage from our work. Or would you let it go and just keep working at it, expecting that eventually we'll break onto the front page? Thanks in advance! Let me know if you need more info. I tried to be general with terms/site for my client's sake.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheatreSolutionsInc0 -
How to get more keyword ideas
I am trying to get more keyword ideas for one of my project. For example the seed keyword is computer virus and the results which i get is keywords related to the phrase computer virus such as virus in computer , virus threats but actually i am trying to get search details on actual threat names or types of viruses and i expect output such as malware, trojan etc.. ( Currently using ad words keyword planner to fetch keyword data ) Is there any way to achieve this ? Even if i use "types of computer viruses" as seed keyword i am not getting the types of viruses people searching for instead i get keywords ideas such as computer viruses, computer threats etc... ? Can somebody suggest a solution ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NortonSupportSEO0 -
2 pages optimised for same keyword... what should I do?
Hi, I have two pages appearing in positions 11 and 12 for the keyword: 80 btl mortgage. These are: https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/landlord-advice/mortgages/btl-mortgage-80-ltv/ https://www.commercialtrust.co.uk/btl/product-types/80-buy-to-let-mortgages/ Both pages are good, provide useful information and I would not wish to remove one of them. However, I am concerned that the reason neither one of the pages is on page 1 is because the keywords targeted on both pages is essentially the same. Should I reoptimise one of them for other variations of 80 BTL mortgage keywords? (e.g. 80% LTV Buy to Let Mortgage, 80 Buy to Let Mortgage, etc etc) Or, is there another solution I haven't yet thought of? I welcome your insights! Thanks! Amelia
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommT0 -
Image optimization in 2013
hello post the google Image update ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/01/faster-image-search.html ) please could you let me know what the status of image optimization is and also what the best practices are? Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Keyword cannibalization
I ran the SEOMoz onpage diagnostic, and i got an alert for keyword cannibalization. My taxonomy is: www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/category (category page) www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword (supporting page) Links will be exact match in the primary navigation. www.mysite.com anchor text "category" => www.mysite.com/category www.mysite.com anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword www.mysite.com/category anchor text "category keyword" => www.mysite.com/category/category-keyword and example would be /IT-support linking with anchor text "IT Support Servers" => /IT-Support/IT-Support-Servers I'm not going to have a cannibalization problem, am I?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
Image ALT Descriptions
Due to the way our system is and the way we want to do something. We have to make the description for each image in the ALT. Now this is not just a few words but is actually a few sentences. Is there going to be any negative disadvantage to doing it this way? The positives I see is that it will help with accessibility and atleast the bots will be able to tell what the item is about. The negatives is that maybe this description could be better used elsewhere?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | websitesaleslab0 -
Optimization for an Car Image Gallery Site
I have a site where I feature several car images and the details/press releases about those cars. So normal layout would be an article page consisting of the following: Article Text Image gallery list laid out for user to browse. Now, when a user clicks on the image, the link opens up in another page with the image as a main content and then other image belonging to same article are shown below to browse. Each of such pages with images from same article are linked to one another with 'rel'=prev/next and has a 'rel' canonical to the page with article text. Am I doing this right to prevent thin content and duplication issue? Each of the images are for same car and are related to one another. The site under question is DieselStation. Also, if you can provide a general feedback on the site's layout and architecture in terms of SEO, that would be great.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90