Images - ALT and Title?

[essdeekay]

I read on SEOChat that adding Title tags to images helps with SEO.

I already have ALT tags - is it worth adding Title to all images?

Si

[Top banana]

Never heard of a title tag for an image before. I thought that the two key things to do to images (for SEO) is:

1) Name the image with the keywords, e.g. cheap-lawn-mower.jpg
2) Give the image a keyword rich alt tag, e.g. "cheap lawn mowers"

Find out more here.

[essdeekay]

http://forums.seochat.com/google-opt...800.html?pp=15

12th line down under "metatags"

Si

[Top banana]

Sorry, i stand corrected.

This article explains it well: http://www.mediacollege.com/internet...image-tag.html

[essdeekay]

Thanks top banana,

I just wonder just how wrothwhile it is for SEO?

Si

[Top banana]

Well i dont know about you but i search google images on a daily basis. The traffic is a lot lower than main google search but is much, much easier to appear on the first page of the search.

E.g main search for "mobile phones" 110 million results, on the image search its only 3 million.

So yes i think its worth it.

[Brendon]

Last time I looked seriously, it was pretty worthless. That may have changed a bit

[csn]

From an accessibility perspective, use both title and alt. Alt displays a tooltip in IE when you hover over the image. Firefox displays a tooltip only if title is set.

Easiest way to do this is use the same text for both the alt and title tag.

If you are interested in having a well coded site, you should have both.

[essdeekay]

Thanks all

Si

[Sean Thompson]

My attitude is this - the guys at google, yahoo etc create information retrieval tools.. so wherever possible, we should place relevant information.
e.g.
if your photo is of a product, for example, a kids play pool, call it 'kids-play-pool.jpg' not 'dsc000001.jpg'.
Add 'alt' text' - 'kids play pool'
If it's in a uniqe span or div tag, make the ID / title relevant.
Also SEO peeps should keep tabs on microformats, and build content with SEO, and microformats in mind - even if microformats are not defined for your content yet, you could lead the way by being the first..

[Paul Smith]

I read on SEOChat that adding Title tags to images helps with SEO.

I already have ALT tags - is it worth adding Title to all images?

Si

At the end of the day whether you name your images, alt them, title them or leave them plain is barely going to make any difference, even if it is good practice.

So long as your pages contain the keywords your targeting in the copy, title and description tags, then it's really off page activities (quality of backlinks, anchor text, age of site, etc) that are going to influence where you rank.

The days where it helps to insert the keyword into every single attribute on the page are gone, i wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it.

[tbp]

Its debatable that the title tag makes much difference, if it did it would be too open to abuse!

However, I do think it looks nice on images and ordinary links, so I do use it, and I expect from a usability point of view it would help screen readers etc.

So theres no harm in using it at all, but I think it would only have a neglible effect on SEO. I haven't noticed any difference to my rankings since I started using it a lot across my site.