Do these items affect Google ranking or Quality Score?

[gataninc]

Hi community, After my first crawl of a site that I'm working to improve the SEO on, I find that I have about 500 issues regarding missing Alt Text and Title text for images on my site, as well as about 175 issues with regard to duplicate meta description, missing meta descriptions, and too short/too long meta descriptions. My client is not sure it matters to fix these items and only wants to do so if they have an affect on Google ranking or Quality Score. Does anyone know? Thanks!

[MonicaOConnor]

I agree and I disagree. I know in this case it could be considered "low priority" but in all reality, this is the snippet you want showing when someone searches for your keyword, so it really should be optimized with the rest of the meta data, all at one time. Changing bits and pieces isn't the most efficient way to get it done. It is more likely to see a change in rankings when the on page optimization is all completed correctly at one time.

Use the on page grader tool here to double check each page individually. It will give you a list of the things you need to change to best optimize a page for a particular key term.

[TheeDigital]

Fix the alt and title tags on the images, and while you're at it rename the images so they are relevant as that was likely not done. As far as meta descriptions, that will not help you rank, but can affect clicktrhough rates in the SERPs. My thoughts are you probably have a lot more cleanup to do and adjusting meta descriptions should be a lower priority task.

[MonicaOConnor]

The HTML data you are referring to is extremely important. This is first level SEO. Your HTML is the first part of on page optimization. That is where you highlight the keyword your page is about. If there are duplicate meta tags and descriptions you will have a really hard time ranking for any key terms in your content.

[Hutch42]

Yes all of those can negatively effect your ranking.