Hidden H1 Tag on Image

[nerdieb]

Hi,

In the page I'm working on, I encountered an

tag in an image, rather than in a text form.

Do you think it's an issue when it comes to SEO?
What do you suggest I should do if there is an issue?

Keen to hear from you!

[AndyMozster]

Short answer; I think you  can get more value from an H1 tag, so its a small SEO issue.

However, it really depends what image you're talking about. Is this just a logo? If so it doesn't adequately describe page content in a way that people or search engines can understand. Regardless, putting that image in an H1 tag does nothing for the image.

H tags should display a hierarchy. As James mentions above, H1 tags should contain an editorial description of the page; a headline, this is best for usability (which trickles down to SEO impact).

Anecdotally I've found keywords in H1 tags to have greater sway over page relevance than keywords in body copy. They are certainly one of the areas I pay more attention to. Despite that, it's not unusual to find logos in H1 tags, especially on homepages. But I'd encourage you to consider putting that H1 tag around a keyword optimised mission statement/heading on your homepage instead. The logo can remain visually as prominent. Ranking for your companies name is rarely hard so why have the code focus on that?

What about standards? Well interstingly w3c uses img in an H1 tag. With an alt tag of "w3c". That will be machine readable, but not very helpful as a page heading. Then again w3c goes on to use h1 tag for its page titles as well thus committing the sin of multiple H1 tags. Only thing of relevance they say is that you can include HTML in an H1 tag, so one option is an image and text.

In summary;

• one H1 tag per page
• the right place in the hierarchy (with h2 etc)
• keyword optimised but not spammy/stuffy (for deeper pages consider long tail kewords)
• Short, descriptive and engaging text*

*for example mission statements should say who the website represents, what they do and why they're special. Ideally in less than 20 words; think snappy newspaper headline. Answer user intent!

[mediawyse]

It's an issue in that it's not correct.

A "header tag" is always text based. They are used to determine, to search engines, what a page is about. The search engines can't really "see" images in the traditional sense so this application is incorrect.

A lot of designers mistakenly wrap the logo in a H1 tag and call it a day. I call it out in audits all the time. It's just not correct or the best practice. It will have no effect for SEO or for image optimization in that format.

Your goal is always to communicate to users (and Google) what the page is about. The proper application of H1 tags is part of that process.