Not alt tags but Title and description Meta: My designer's answer.

[IoanSaid]

Hello! I was busy doing lots of key wording for my images which I hate and notices that when viewed in source code, the different places I inputed information translated into Title and Description meta tags but NO alt tags. As I'm a a photographer, it's really important to me that I make the most of my images to get increased traffic so I challenged the people behind my website about it. This is their response to the question:

"We all know how important the alt tags are for image SEO so why does
the design allows Title, Description and Keyword image tags but not alt
tags?"

Unfortunately, there is no way to add an alt tag and title tag specifically to an image display page. However, as you have pointed out here, we use other elements that essentially accomplish the same thing.

Each image display page does have its own page title and meta description, as you have also noticed. For the title, we use the IPTC Headline field (if there is no headline, then we use IPTC Title, and if there is no title, then we go to file name), and for the meta description, we use both the IPTC caption as well as the keywords - so all of that information is embedded on the image display page with the image itself and search engines can index this content.

Alt Text data intends to given contextual information to search engines when they crawl your site, and the IPTC metadata that shows along with your images, does this as well."

What is your opinion on that answer?

[Chris.Menke]

I was speaking in terms of the pictures in your portfolio on your site not the blog, as I assumed those were the images you were talking about.  Was I incorrect?

[IoanSaid]

Maybe because my blog is now on blog.celynnenphotography.co.uk and I've just told Bing and Google about it?

[Chris.Menke]

Loan,

The architecture of your site makes your images reliant on JavaScript to be visible in the browser and to bots, which means that the only thing search engines have to go on as far as an understanding of your site is the meta data but in a quick look, I'm not even sure the URLs that the images are on are getting crawled.  It seems that Google image search contains images from a previous iteration of your website but it is not able to find those images now if you click on any of them.  If you want your images to be found in search, I'd recommend you get with your developers and have them come up with an alternative to the current architecture.

Do this search and see if you can click through to any of your images: site:celynnenphotography.co.uk -inurl:blog

[customerparadigm.com]

Your web developers are hiding behind a content management system that is poorly designed, and their ignorance of ALT tags for images.

I am also a professional photographer (as well as a Google-certified photographer for panoramic business photos, too).

ALT tags were developed for the visually impaired, so that a text reader could read a description of the image to someone who couldn't see it.

In some cases, sites are required by their brand standards or internal guidelines to comply with ADA requirements and  have ALT tags in place for images.

I would tell the web developers that the interface needs to have ALT tags available, and if not, I'd try to move to a different platform that supports this.

The meta information is nice, but ALT tags are critical.  Dreamweaver (current versions) for example, won't let you add an image to a Web page, without putting in an ALT tag for the image.