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metallissimus
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Image <alt> tag

30 Jan 2020, 04:19

I assume this has been asked before, but unfortunately the search function doesn't allow terms with only 3 characters...

So, simple question: How can I set an alt-tag for images?
www.danielbollinger.de – corporate photography
hochzeiten.danielbollinger.de – wedding photography
 
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

30 Jan 2020, 06:26

The image's TITLE is used as ALT tag for the image.
Image

You might not be displaying titles? In which case, you can still use the title input to add ALT tags for your images. You can't currently have different display titles and alt tags, but under normal circumstances, the title should be a pretty good human-focused ALT tag.
 
metallissimus
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Re: Image <alt> tag

30 Jan 2020, 06:30

Great, that's as easy as I had hoped.
Maybe you could add this information to the help-popup for image title?
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

30 Jan 2020, 06:38

metallissimus wrote:Maybe you could add this information to the help-popup for image title?
Alright!
 
metallissimus
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Re: Image <alt> tag

17 Feb 2020, 05:39

mjau-mjau wrote: The image's TITLE is used as ALT tag for the image.

You can't currently have different display titles and alt tags...
As you know from my other post  I am digging a little bit into SEO right now. From what I understand so far, this above mentioned situation isn't ideal. Maybe something to consider for a future release?
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

17 Feb 2020, 20:37

metallissimus wrote:As you know from my other post  I am digging a little bit into SEO right now. From what I understand so far, this above mentioned situation isn't ideal. Maybe something to consider for a future release?
Maybe, but I am bit wary of this. Logically and technically, an image "title" should be ideal for a human-readable image "alt" tag. After all, Google's entire modern approach to SEO is that seo attributes should be made for "humans", because this is the entire point in the first place. If they contain keyword-spamming, they are not for humans, and Google doesn't want that. Besides, may I ask if this is specifically to get images into Google's image-search? I wonder how much emphasis is on the alt tag for this purpose in comparison to all other factors.
 
metallissimus
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Re: Image <alt> tag

18 Feb 2020, 05:00

I guess different "title" and "alt" tags are just another possibility to use a wider range of (key)words and diversify the wording a little bit. Like with a site's title and meta description – the former is a very concise description of the site's content whereas the latter is more detailed.
mjau-mjau wrote: Besides, may I ask if this is specifically to get images into Google's image-search? I wonder how much emphasis is on the alt tag for this purpose in comparison to all other factors.
Honestly I don't know which ranking benefits the most from well SEOed images.
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

18 Feb 2020, 09:41

metallissimus wrote:I guess different "title" and "alt" tags are just another possibility to use a wider range of (key)words and diversify the wording a little bit. Like with a site's title and meta description – the former is a very concise description of the site's content whereas the latter is more detailed.
Yes, but a page's TITLE and DESCRIPTION are two very different but important attributes. Title is the most important SEO tag, while DESCRIPTION is irrelevant to SEO ... However, description will decide what shows when sharing a link on social media, and will also display in the SERP in Google search (below the title and url). Image ALT on the other hand, does not have much emphasis (relatively speaking), and it's unclear what emphasis it has and for what. The image TITLE is ONLY X3, and is not even a tag, so why not use the content of title to populate the ALT attribute? You are not diversifying anything by having different title and alt tag, and even if you were, how would you know diversifying and making TITLE and ALT different is a good thing for seo?

Just to be clear, when I speak of TITLE, I mean the X3 image title, which may display as text on the website. I am not speaking of the optional <img> title attribute, which is used for tooltips on mouse hover, but which is irrelevant to SEO.
mjau-mjau wrote:Honestly I don't know which ranking benefits the most from well SEOed images.
I think perhaps ALT tag has most effect to improve ranking of a PAGE where the image is embedded, if the image(s) on the page relate to the page's surrounding text. In other words, an image with alt tags alone (for instance X3 gallery layouts), does not really mean much. This seems to be the case from reading Google's own article on ALT tag, which also seems to recommend human-readable alt tags:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/a ... e-alt-text
 
metallissimus
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Re: Image <alt> tag

18 Feb 2020, 10:52

mjau-mjau wrote: Just to be clear, when I speak of TITLE, I mean the X3 image title, which may display as text on the website.
Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't aware of that (although I realised the title doesn't appear on hover, but I guessed that could be for a number of reasons).
I am not speaking of the optional <img> title attribute [...] which is irrelevant to SEO.
This seems to be wrong. Quoting from the link you posted:
Google wrote:Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles.
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

18 Feb 2020, 23:12

metallissimus wrote:This seems to be wrong. Quoting from the link you posted:
Google wrote:Google extracts information about the subject matter of the image from the content of the page, including captions and image titles.
When Google refers to "caption" and "image titles", these are just generic terms for text that is assigned around the image. There is no CAPTION attribute in HTML, and with "image titles", I don't see any reason to believe they are referring to the "title" attribute, which is meant for ANY html elements (mostly anchor links). The point of the TITLE attribute, is to assign a tooltip for the element (normally links), but this only works on mouse-hover devices anyway. Although seo changes all the time, the title ATTRIBUTE has no effect (or extremely little effect) on SEO.
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/qu ... p-image-se
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/qu ... ant-to-seo

In the last link, they mention it might count, although much less than ALT. The question is, why would it be beneficial to add the same text in title as alt tag? Just because Google reads BOTH attributes, doesn't mean it will provide your page or image MORE weight. Clearly Google likes human-readable titles, as opposed to keywords. Also, one thing is optimizing a PAGE (where the image is embedded), but optimizing the image itself for SEO? It's unclear.
 
metallissimus
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Re: Image <alt> tag

21 Feb 2020, 06:39

mjau-mjau wrote:The question is, why would it be beneficial to add the same text in title as alt tag?
I was rather thinking of different text there.
mjau-mjau wrote:It's unclear.
For me too, so we don't need to dive deeper into this discussion, I have too little knowledge to contribute.

One other thing I just noticed: Image title to alt-tag works perfectly in galleries, but not automatically when adding images to the page content via the editor. The alt-tag is simply left empty and you have to fill it in manually. I don't know if it's technically possible to have that applied automatically, would be very convenient.
www.danielbollinger.de – corporate photography
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

22 Feb 2020, 00:43

metallissimus wrote:
mjau-mjau wrote:The question is, why would it be beneficial to add the same text in title as alt tag?
I was rather thinking of different text there.
Yep, but then why different? Google doesn't normally rank higher just because there is more text spread across attributes. Might be "keyword dilution". And Google doesn't like keyword-ish texts that are not made for humans. Anyway, thanks for the debate on this ... It's definitely a hot topic.
metallissimus wrote:One other thing I just noticed: Image title to alt-tag works perfectly in galleries, but not automatically when adding images to the page content via the editor. The alt-tag is simply left empty and you have to fill it in manually. I don't know if it's technically possible to have that applied automatically, would be very convenient.
Probably. I will add it to my list. In the meantime, it's pretty easy to simply populate the alt="..." tag manually.
 
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mjau-mjau
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Re: Image <alt> tag

28 Mar 2020, 11:31

metallissimus wrote:One other thing I just noticed: Image title to alt-tag works perfectly in galleries, but not automatically when adding images to the page content via the editor. The alt-tag is simply left empty and you have to fill it in manually. I don't know if it's technically possible to have that applied automatically, would be very convenient.
This feature has been included in new X3.28.0 release:
www.photo.gallery/blog/photo-gallery-x3-28/