Image Alt And Title

[boxerdog]

What would I put for these for say a picture of a car on my site?

Title text
&
Alt text

thanks.

 

[peter_w]

You don't need to use title for SEO purposes, most crawlers (including Google) only look at alt.

The alt text is basically a description for the image - so if it's a blue Ford Fiesta... That's your alt text.

 

[boxerdog]

Excellent thanks for that.

 

[denchomsky]

You don't need to use title for SEO purposes, most crawlers (including Google) only look at alt.

Not necessarily true, if the image is linking to another page there should be a title tag and it should describe the action of the link.

So lets say the picture of the ford Fiesta linked to a gallery of ford Fiestas, the title tag would be "Link to ford Fiesta Gallery", and this can be beneficial for SEO.

 

[peter_w]

I'm pretty sure none of Google's guidelines say to do that. And they specifically say it's irrelevant to their bot in this post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html

Though it's a fairly moot point anyway in the grand scheme of things.

 

[denchomsky]

I'm pretty sure none of Google's guidelines say to do that. And they specifically say it's irrelevant to their bot in this post: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/12/using-alt-attributes-smartly.html

That is 4 years old, SEO techniques and google's algorithms are changing all the time.

 

[peter_w]

One would expect they would update their image publishing guidelines if they were interested in making use of the title attribute on images?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=114016

We are presumably going to have to disagree on this topic

 

[Aegean]

I would say to the OP to use both as they were meant to be used, with the ALT tag used as an image description such as "image of a blue Ford Escort", the TITLE used as in "1993 blue Ford Escort", and much more importantly the image filename bluefordescort.jpg

This will not only fully comply with Google's guidelines but using the descriptive filename also improves positions in google images and well as helping a little with onpage seo.

 

[Skinner]

I use alt to describe the image as lots of blind peoples readers read the alt out to them, so a simple description of the image seems to work best.

Title Tags I sometimes use for a condensed almost keyword version of the alt tag.

I use this method simply because google use this on their own site, so if they do it, maybe it helps.

Title Tags are sometimes used with JavaScript too, so make sure you have java that finds elements by title as it can send JS all funky.

 

[denchomsky]

We are presumably going to have to disagree on this topic

I don't think there is a right and wrong answer.

According to W3.org - Setting the [title] attribute on a link allows user agents (visual and non-visual) to tell users about the nature of the linked resource.

This of course does not just apply to the title attribute of the <img> tag but any link.

D

 

[Ashton]

Images should not have a title tag. The link that wraps the image should have the title tag.

 

[jj1]

Personally, I use the same text for alt and title - from memory, alt text doesn't show in Firefox whereas title text does.

I work the odd keyword into the alt and title text where relevant but don't overdo things. As someone said, if the car is a "Blue Ford Fiesta Y registration, automatic, air-conditioned, heated seats etc etc" then that's informative to the viewer and contains some keywords for the search engines.