Image alt tags shouldn't contain keywords?
-
Hi Everyone,
I've been informed recently that keyword within your image alt tags can be a trigger for penguin if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page (over-optimisation).
I'm not sure I understand why though, the reason for this is, we have a page which features a picture and a description of a product. The page title, heading, a mention in content and image alt all contain a keyword which is the product name.
I've been told to remove these alt tags but aren't alt tags important for screen readers and other W3C complacency issues, so removing the product names from the alt (which also happens to be the keyword for the product pages but is best describing what the image is) would make these image useless to users with certain disabilities, so if its true that doing this can be a negative signal isn't this breaking googles guidelines by not providing good content for those users?
Would it be better to remove these alt tags or attempt to remove keyword elsewhere on the page? or can anyone suggest something else?
Thanks in advance.
-
I've been informed recently that keyword within your image alt tags can be a trigger for penguin if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page.
I don't think that keywords in your alt tag should be a problem. The alt tag is intended to give essential information about your image to someone who is using a screen reader because they are visually impaired. So, your alt tag should contain words that describe the image. That might be keywords it might not be keywords. Just be accurate. Google is not going to slap you because of your alt tags.
if you have your keyword mentioned too often on the page.
Here is the problem. Fix this.
-
Thanks Andre and David,
I will look into changing the alt tags to something more descriptive and changing the optimisation of the keywords within the page.
Thanks again for your help.
-
Have a think about how you might be able to change the keyword to something more descriptive for the alt tag.
I had this same problem. So I ensure all my images had a description and I removed any instances of over optimization for certain keywords.
In answer to your question, I would remove instances of your keywords form content (ensuring that you are not under optimizing) before the alt tags. As you rightly said alt tags are important for screen readers and other W3C complacency issues
Dave
-
IMO Alt image tags shouldn't play a part in over optimization i wouldn't think. If anything, reduce the amount of times the product name is mentioned in the content.
If i were to further improve the alt image tags however, i'd suggest including descriptive words as well as the product name:
Original: Blue Shoes
New: Shiny Blue Shoes for Boys
This way, your not laser targeting each page for a certain keyword and instead mixing it up a bit for users. It looks natural this way and your images should still rank for the keywords.
Greg
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
-
How can i define a ALT Tag for Youtube videos?
Hello, When i scan with SEMrush it shows all such pages do not have ALT Tags http://img.youtube.com/vi/iJ4pmmRSZxc/hqdefault.jpg What should the ALT be for them and how can i control as we have 1000's of Youtube videos displayed on various parts of our website Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | ktrinkqao120 -
Moz Crawl Shows Duplicate Content Which Doesn't Seem To Appear In Google?
Morning All, First post, be gentle! So I had Moz crawl our website with 2500 high priority issues of duplicate content, not good. However if I just do a simple site:www.myurl.com in Google, I cannot see these duplicate pages....very odd. Here is an example....
On-Page Optimization | | scottiedog
http://goo.gl/GXTE0I
http://goo.gl/dcAqdU So the same page has a different URL, Moz brings this up as an issue, I would agree with that. However if I google both URL's in Google, they will both bring up the same page but with the original URL of http://goo.gl/zDzI7j ...in other words, two different URL's bring up the same indexed page in Google....weird I thought about using a wildcard in the robots.txt to disallow these duplicate pages with poor URL's....something like.... Disallow: /*display.php?product_id However, I read various posts that it might not help our issues? Don't want to make things worse. On another note, my colleague paid for a "SEO service" and they just dumped 1000's of back-links to our website, of course that's come back to bite us in the behind. Anyone have any recommendations for a good service to remove these back-links? Thanks in advance!!0 -
SEO HTML: Header tags
A few of quick SEO questions regarding header tags: More than one tag per page. If there is more than one tag on a page: are both taken into consideration and what if they contain the same keyword? Eg on the page: http://en.emilea.be/childrens-clothes/molo/boys/cardigans-and-sweaters/ MoloBoysCardigans & sweaters ... Molo childrens clothes Is the 2nd considered when indexing the page? Since both tags contain the same keyword (but in different context) is this a SEO plus or minus? Nested tags inside header tags. I presume the nested tags are omitted, but if there is no white space between the tags are these concatenated? <span tag='molo'>Molo<span tag='boys'>Boys<span tag='cardigans-and-sweaters'>Cardigans & sweaters</span tag='cardigans-and-sweaters'></span tag='boys'></span tag='molo'> How is the above header processed? MoloBoysCardigans & sweaters
On-Page Optimization | | Webxtrakt
or
2) Molo Boys Cardigans & sweaters Order of header tags.
How important is the order of header tags and how do they influence the following content. F.ex. if the top part of the page contains multiple tags and the middle part contains 1-2 tags. Does this affect the importance of the tags and would it be better to use tags above? Thanks in advance.0 -
Is there a recommended character limit for alt text tags?
I've searched around for a maximum number of characters to use when writing alt tags, but not seeing anything more than "don't keyword stuff." Is there a recommended number of characters?
On-Page Optimization | | KimCalvert0 -
Canonical tags
In previous we had issues with capital letters in page urls. So we made a 301 redirection to lower case page url. But I read there that it's not good idea to use 301 redirection, better solution for that canonical tag. So we placed canonical url tak to lower case page url... So after week, in google webmaster tools I see around 60k os dublicate pages. Why google don't see canonical tag? Thank you
On-Page Optimization | | bele0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Title Keyword Question
I'm writing up keywords for new pages on a website. There are a number of variations on the way we can say what we're looking for, and I don't want to post the specific keywords but I'll give an example using fruits. Let's say I want to optimize for Granny Smith apples, McIntosh apples, Jonathan apples, etc. Could my title be Apples - Granny Smith, McIntosh, Jonathan and my page will come up when someone searchs "Granny Smith apples" or "McIntosh apples" etc. or do the words have to be repeated in order. Obviously I will also be repeating these in the description and on the page I'm optimizing. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | crlana0 -
How many meta tags are appropriate?
How many meta tags are appropriate? There is a page that ranks above me that has many more than I do. It has (I have removed the content of each to give a description of the type of content): I only use meta tags for keywords and description, robots. Should I have more? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | scanlin0