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.
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
-
International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help. We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us. Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page? So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different? Example: General page: www.example.com/estate-car US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon Hreflang tags: Would that be the correct implementation? Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | SEOCT0 -
Who uses WordPress Tags anymore?
Just curious if people are still using WordPress Tags. I wonder if with the direction Google is going the last couple years, having sites that get bloated with extraneous Tag archives just decreases the quality of the site.
Technical SEO | | WilliamBay2 -
Is the " meta content tag" important?
I am currently trying to optimize my companies website and I noticed that meta content is exactly the same for all of the pages on our website. Isn't this problematic? The actual content on the webpage is not the same and a lot of the pages don't have these keywords in the content.
Technical SEO | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Nesting tag within tables?
I am working with a site that is using tables to display data. My question is should I nest header tags within the table header , or tags. For example, the beginning of a new row could have a "row header" that is an tag, or the caption is an .
Technical SEO | | OlivierChateau0 -
Duplicate content - wordpress image attachement
I have run my seomoz campaign through my wordpress site and found duplicate content. However, all of this duplicate content was either my logo or images and no content with addresses like /?attachement_id=4 for example . How should I resolve this? thank you.
Technical SEO | | htmanage0 -
H1 Tag.
As far as I know to rank well H1 tag should be present in all pages and it should be one of the first things in the page, it also should include the keywords. I was checking my site and magento generates the H1 with an image, www.theprinterdepo.com I dont know if this is wise? class="logo">The Printer Depo<a <span="">href</a><a <span="">="</a>http://www.theprinterdepo.com/" title="The Printer Depo" class="logo">width="377px" src="https://www.theprinterdepo.com/skin/frontend/default/MAG060062/images/logo.gif" alt="The Printer Depo" />
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
Same image file with different alt text?
I have an image that represents 'widgets'. The image works for more than one kind of widget. I have two pages, one optimized for 'blue widgets' and one optimized for 'red widgets'. I would like to use the same 'widgets' image on both pages but change the alt text to be 'blue widgets' or 'red widgets' depending on the page it is used on. Should I: (1) use the same image on different pages with different alt text. (2) duplicate the image file and have two copies 'red_widgets.jpg' and 'blue_widgets.jpg' and then use each copy on the page optimized for the corresponding phrase. (3) create distinct, unique image files (where the pixels are different, not just the file names) for each kind of widget. This is a simplified example of a larger SEO problem where I have 1 image that can be useful on 20 pages that are each optimized for 20 different phrases. Should I use the same image with 20 different alt tags, or create 20 identical (but renamed) copies of the image, or create 20 slightly different image files (with different pixels in each image)? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | scanlin0 -
How similar do pages need to be in order to utilize the canonical tag
Here is my specific situation. My company released new versions of a few documents in the fall. I was hoping that over time the old version would decline and the new version would rise but after 6 months the old version continues to rank #1 and the new version #3. The old version needs to stay on our site but users should really be getting to the most recent version. I think utilizing the canonical tag would solve the issue but i am concerned because the content on the actual pages is not duplicate but it is updated. Below are the two URLs to see the differences in the content. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/06tr008.cfm http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/10tr033.cfm Is this an appropriate situation to use the canonical tag? If not, is there a better solution.
Technical SEO | | SEI0