Images displayed on a web page with the IMG tag have two attributes, ALT and TITLE: what about SEO for these two pieces of information? Are they taken into account by the engines and what to indicate in these areas?
Images are omnipresent on the internet and in our lives. It is therefore important to give them visibility in the web and image search engines. Two HTML attributes are very often mentioned for this: Alt and Title.
But are both effective? And how should they best be managed? We try to answer these questions in this video…
So you will learn more about it by watching this video number 223:
Images: alt, title and SEO attributes – Video #223 proposed by Olivier Andrieu (Abondance). Source: Abundance
Transcript of SEO Video 223: “Images: Alt, Title and SEO Attributes”:
“Hello and welcome to this 223rd Abundance video where I wanted to talk to you about images and specifically the ALT and title attributes and how they are used in SEO.
We start with the html tag, the img tag which is the image tag, src is the url address of the image, the alt attribute, the title attribute and then other information like width and height etc. . which we won’t talk about in this video. We focus here on the alt attribute and the title attribute. What can we say in general? We don’t say “alt tag” 🙂 It’s an old SEO habit, sometimes beginners, but we don’t say alt tag, we say alt attribute of an img tag.
The two attributes, information from accessibility specialists, the two attributes alt and title are taken into account by accessibility software, especially for the blind, and therefore both attributes have their interest in accessibility. So you have to put both.
Depending on the browser, when you move the mouse pointer over an image, a small tool tip with the text of an attribute is displayed. Depending on the browser like Chrome, Firefox, etc. either the alt or the title will be displayed. Somehow both have their use here as well.
Do you need to provide the same content for both attributes? Since both are used for accessibility, if you get a broken image or hover over an image, you end up realizing that it’s mostly the same two pieces of information and the same text in both attributes. Everyone will of course have their own way of doing things and may do things differently.
And then of course only the img tags have the alt and title attributes. So if the image is displayed with stylesheets, of course with CSS we lose the alt, the title and in general we lose all the SEO gain for the images. I urge you to review the video I made specifically on this point.
Regarding the engines they account for, I just repeated a small set of tests to find out how the engines accounted for these two attributes. So at the level of web search engines, the classic search engine on web pages, Google takes the alt into account – be careful because recently John Mueller said that Google doesn’t take it into account, but yes I confirm that taking the alt into account, the tests are on clear at this level. He doesn’t take the title. Bing does not take alt or title for the classic web search engine. For image search engines, Google and Bing work the same way a priori: they consider the alt and not the title, so the title is never considered by search engines and Google uses the alt for the web and for the image and Bing only for the images.
And then, of course, what are we going to put as text in those two attributes? So there will always be a preference or trade-off that is made, either towards SEO or towards accessibility. Here, if I take the example of the image we see on the screen, which is the main image for an article I recently published on Abundance entitled “Google News for the Summer Holidays,” if we prefer SEO, we will , put the title of the article in alto and in the title and if we rather prefer accessibility we must describe what can be seen in the picture, so we will put “man with a backpack jumping over a road”, it lies up to you to prioritize either SEO or accessibility. We can use a little bit of both, well finally after we’ve seen, but most of the time we have to make choices, we have to choose either SEO or accessibility.
So much for this little video that provides a quick summary of alt and title attributes for SEO. I urge you, as usual, to watch the videos I’ve made in the past, especially the one on the img or css I talked about earlier, and it remains for me to wish you a great week. Thank you for your loyalty and see you soon for a new Abundance video! Thanks and bye ! 🙂 »