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
-
Non-standard HTML tags in content
I had coded my website's article content with a non-standard tag <cnt>that surrounded other standard tags that contained the article content, I.e.</cnt> , . The whole text was enclosed in a div that used Schema.org markup to identify the contents of the div as the articleBody. When looking at scraped data for stories in Webmaster Tools, the content of the story was there and identified as the articleBody correctly. It's recently been suggested by someone else that the presence of the non-standard <cnt>tags were actually making the content of the article uncrawlable by the Googlebot, this effectively rendering the content invisible. I did not believe this to be true, since the content appeared to be correctly indexed in Webmaster Tools, but for the sake of a test I agreed to removing them. In the last 6 weeks since they were removed, there have been no changes in impressions or traffic from organic search, which leads me to believe that the removal of the <cnt>tags actually had no effect, since the content was already being indexed successfully and nothing else has changed.</cnt></cnt> My question is whether or not an encapsulating non-standard tag as I've described would actually make the content invisible to Googlebot, or if it should not have made any difference so long as the correct Schema.org markup was in place? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | dlindsey0 -
Canonical link tag for https - any disadvantages for SEO?
Hi Mozzers, We have a website that has both http as well as https indexed. I proposed the solution of implementing a canonical link tag on all pages (including the login/secure ones). Any disadvantages I could expect? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DeptAgency0 -
Are similar title tags frowned upon by search engines?
We are a B2B company that is looking to convert to one global portal very soon. It is only then that we will be able to address a lot of the IA SEO issues we are currently facing. However, we are looking to make some quick fixes, namely adding a proper title to the different country homepages. Will having the same title, with only the country modifier swapped out be a good tactic? Since we want a unified title across all country sites, it just makes sense that we don't change it for every single country. For example: Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company USA Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | Company Italy Small Business Solutions for B2B Marketers | France
Technical SEO | | marshseo0 -
Title Tags in 2013
For blog posts do you think it is better to use something like "Atlanta Plumbing Company" or "Choosing an Atlanta Plumbing Company" (article title). I have been using the article titles but I think it might be hindering rankings a bit. I use to use the keyword but it seems a bit spammy now. I want to create titles for the readers but rank well too. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | SeattleJoe0 -
Title tag code
Hi, I have a couple of websites where I can't define the title tag (CMS does not support it) on a few default pages. On these pages "the system" just uses the primary/main title tag (from the frontpage) and my programming skills (as if I have any...!) have not been able to make a html code or something to override the main title tag on these specific pages. Does this make sense at all and can anyone give me a hint, a code to try out or something? Problem is that I now have 3 pages with the same title tag which in terms of SEO isn't too good, so to say... Thanks in advance. Jan
Technical SEO | | Wello12340 -
Google Alerts News Images
I have a Google Alert setup which is pulling information from a blog. I am receiving images as part of the alert. The issue that I am having is that the images have nothing to do with the blog post. Is there a way to control what images are received in the alert. From what I have gathered, if it grabs an image it should be part of the blog post.
Technical SEO | | ricknakao0 -
Image map crawlability
Hey Mozzer's, I'm reviewing a moving site which utilizes an image map for their service areas. As I'm new to image mapping how should I diagnose them for crawlability, effectiveness, code (which appears correct using HTML & alt text tag), what should I be looking for, etc? I'm trying to determine the effectiveness of the image map links compared to including some regular lateral links on the page. Page: http://bit.ly/KOOtgN Thanks in advance for all advice and insights.
Technical SEO | | Bragg0 -
Tags and Duplicate Content
Just wondering - for a lot of our sites we use tags as a way of re-grouping articles / news / blogs so all of the info on say 'government grants' can be found on one page. These /tag pages often come up with duplicate content errors, is it a big issue, how can we minimnise that?
Technical SEO | | salemtas0