Image Alt Text: Do I Need to Link my Image for it to Count?

[seo.owl]

Hi

I learned from a very senior SEO that I must link my images if I want Google to read my alt tag for my images.

I don't believe this though... is it true?

If the answer is not true (which I suppose it is), then maybe you can help me answer this:

1. was he confused or why would he tell me this?

2. i didn't know what i should do so now, whenever i embed an image on my blog posts, i just link them to the blog post in which the image shows... in essence, by clicking the image, the page gets refreshed.

does this sound like a good strategy for images?

thanks in advance!!!

[seo.owl]

Paul,

excellent response.  thank you so much.

i use Yoast SEO plugin.  Why do you say the yoast image 'redirect' is not the same thing as I am doing?  It seems like the exact same?

Ben

[MoosaHemani]

Agree with Francisco!

if this senior is your BOSS lol i have had a boss in one of ex company i worked for! THe only difference is he called himself an expert!

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm with Francisco - whoever told you that is flat out wrong.

The alt tag in it's purest function is to provide a text description of images for vision-impaired page visitors. It is designed to be read by screen-reader software so the visually impaired can still understand what the image is and how it relates to the rest of the page. There is absolutely no reason a link would need be included in order for the alt attribute to do its job. Put another way - the alt attribute is applied to the img source tag. The link tag (href) is totally separate.

As far as what you're doing now, the link is totally extraneous and would probably annoy/confuse a user who though clicking on a linked image should actually take them somewhere else.

Unlike Francisco, I strongly suggest, unless you're linking to a larger version of the same image, that you simple include no link at all. Having it link to its attachment page in WordPress is also a very bad idea as that creates huge numbers of very thin-content pages which give no value to the visitor, cause major site-crawling problems and are worthless if they get ranked in image search.

There's even a setting in Yoast's Wordpress SEO plugin to handle this issue by redirecting the attachment page back to the original blog post the image appeared on. (Note this is not the same as what you're currently doing) Again, if Wordpress, simply set None for the link URL.

Hope that makes sense?

Paul

[Francisco_Meza]

1. I think he may have been confused. I have never heard of that. The img alt"" attribute works for SEO, but I have never heard that you needed it to <h ref="">to something in order for it to work. </h>

2. Don't do that. You're just creating loops.

If this senior SEO is your boss, then just link it to the regular image as it's done in WordPress. It won't hurt anything.