Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Hidden H1 Tag on Image
-
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!
-
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!
-
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.
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
-
Not all images indexed in Google
Hi all, Recently, got an unusual issue with images in Google index. We have more than 1,500 images in our sitemap, but according to Search Console only 273 of those are indexed. If I check Google image search directly, I find more images in index, but still not all of them. For example this post has 28 images and only 17 are indexed in Google image. This is happening to other posts as well. Checked all possible reasons (missing alt, image as background, file size, fetch and render in Search Console), but none of these are relevant in our case. So, everything looks fine, but not all images are in index. Any ideas on this issue? Your feedback is much appreciated, thanks
Technical SEO | | flo_seo1 -
Google not Indexing images on CDN.
My URL is: https://bit.ly/2hWAApQ We have set up a CDN on our own domain: https://bit.ly/2KspW3C We have a main xml sitemap: https://bit.ly/2rd2jEb and https://bit.ly/2JMu7GB is one the sub sitemaps with images listed within. The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: https://bit.ly/2FAWJjk. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. I ve followed all the steps and still none of the images are being indexed. My problem seems similar to this ticket https://bit.ly/2FzUnBl but however different because we don't have a separate image sitemap but instead have listed image urls within the sitemaps itself. Can anyone help please? I will promptly respond to any queries. Thanks
Technical SEO | | TNZ
Deepinder0 -
Image Sitemap
I currently use a program to create our sitemap (xml). It doesn't offer creating an mage sitemaps. Can someone suggest a program that would create an image sitemap? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Kdruckenbrod0 -
Image Search
Hello Community, I have been reading and researching about image search and trying to find patterns within the results but unfortunately I could not get to a conclusion on 2 matters. Hopefully this community would have the answers I am searching for. 1) Watermarked Images (To remove or not to remove watermark from photos) I see a lot of confusion on this subject and am pretty much confused myself. Although it might be true that watermarked photos do not cause a punishment, it sure does not seem to help. At least in my industry and on a bunch of different random queries I have made, watermarked images are hard to come by on Google's images results. Usually the first results do not have any watermarks. I have read online that Google takes into account user behavior and most users prefer images with no watermark. But again, it is something "I have read online" so I don't have any proof. I would love to have further clarification and, if possible, a definite guide on how to improve my image results. 2) Multiple nested folders (Folder depth) Due to speed concerns our tech guys are using 1 image per folder and created a convoluted folder structure where the photos are actually 9 levels deep. Most of our competition and many small Wordpress blogs outrank us on Google images and on ALL INSTANCES I have checked, their photos are 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. Never inside 9 nested folders.
Technical SEO | | Koki.Mourao
So... A) Should I consider removing the watermark - which is not that intrusive but is visible?
B) Should I try to simplify the folder structure for my photos? Thank you0 -
Product Images with organic results in SERP
Hey Mozzers, I've noticed that several of our product page results in Google have the product image associated with them. Today is the first day I've seen this. Does anyone know anything about these? Has Google put anything out about this? Here's a couple examples: http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/08a16dcf-505e-443c-866d-fae6d805743e/2014-03-31_1031.png http://content.screencast.com/users/Will_Swales/folders/Jing/media/04972e7b-f6b2-4e78-ab11-95c52d69a200/2014-03-31_1056.png What's interesting is that they don't show for me when I use Chrome's Incognito mode. Any insights much appreciated! Will
Technical SEO | | evoNick4 -
Can I have an H1 tag below an H2?
Quick question for you all - Is there an issue with me having an H1 tag physically below an H2 tag on a web page??
Technical SEO | | Pete40 -
For an image which is in the CSS and not the HTML, can you add an alt tag?
I would like to improve SEO on a page with three big images, which are currently hosted in the CSS. The sample I am working with is at http://xquisitevents.com/about-us/ and I put my cursor over the big picture of the wedding dress with bouquet, I inspected the element and saw this code in a div tag: #upperleft { background-image:url(images/AboutTopLeft.jpg); Can I add an alt tag to the CSS somehow, or can I have it added to the HTML? What is the best way to handle this, to include keywords like exquisite weddings and special event designs?
Technical SEO | | BridgetGibbons0 -
Page with h1 and h1 class=
Hi, If a page in the source code has boht following elements: class="blogg_rubrik">TITLE OF THE PAGE Is that bad for SEO, since the first H1 is empty? Shouldn't a page use only one H1?
Technical SEO | | Ypsilon0