Are titles on images still important for SEO?

[EvolveCreative]

We're doing research on image optimization and wanted to ask the MOZ community if you think having titles on images are still important for SEO if you have descriptive ALT text.

[wearehappymedia]

We used to do a lot of infographics, which were very often found through image search, so we found it very important then

[DmitriiK]

Agree with Martin. It can make a lot of difference if your business is heavily visual and can bring customers/visits through image search.

[localwebsolutions]

It really depends on both your niche and type of business. Google still ranks images so yes it is important to a degree. A great example I have was one of my clients had a cake business. After doing some research I found out that more people actually look at the image section of google than search results (it was a very niche cake decoration business). Therefore I had to rank her in the image section. SO yes it was very important then... however as an overall ranking factor I agree it is one of those 'do it if you can' type of things.

[TomRayner]

Very much of the same opinion.

It's one of those 1 percenters. Won't have a big impact, but accumulatively with other things, it's a good idea.

If you can control that element of your SEO, no reason not to do it.

But if you're working on a CMS/Ecommerce system that maybe interferes with this and generates its own title names out-of-the-box, I wouldn't spend too many hours trying to fix it.  Your time is probably better off elsewhere.

[Ria_]

I don't think just specifying a title for an image makes a significant impact at all on its own, but combined with other aspects of image SEO (such as the alt text, the surrounding content and context of the image, filename, etc) helps. Even if a tiny amount. I personally like to include it myself, because why not. If it's relatively effortless, every little helps.

Be interesting to read what other community members make of image titles