H1 image

[brightonseorob]

Hi,

I was talking to a web consultant today that teaches SEO, he said that an image is ok as an h1 tag as long as it has an alt tag. This is something new to me and something that I've always tried to avoid. Does this now work?

Thanks

[virtualhandshake]

Hey Rob,

Let's take a human angle at the h1 tag. It symbolizes "heading". Heading to a piece of information which can be an article, a blog post or company intro/product description on a website.

It's a very very common practice to give a heading to any information that we (humans) want to present. It's very natural and meaningful too as it tells our readers what to expect.

This is probably why search engines give importance to h1 tag(main heading), they are trying to think like humans do, to determine the relevancy of a certain page to corresponding search query.

Similarly alt text gives them an idea that the image is relevant to the subject talked about on the page.

So, I hope that explains. You should continue to avoid using image in h1 tag.

Write a nice compelling heading for your human visitors then, for search engine spiders, wrap it in h1 tag and use your main keyword once (if it isn't there naturally).

Hope that helps.

[CaseyKluver]

I agree with Amit, I am sitting here trying to come up with a logical reason why you would ever need to set up your site with a image in a h1 tag in the first place. You should re-think your overall site structure if this is how you have it set up.

If you are simply just wanting to display a nicer headline, look into embedding a web safe font with CSS

[DotCar]

I wouldn't say that the advice you were given was wrong but like anything there is good ways to do things and there are always better ways to do things.

For instance lets say you are a small business with a low budget and the idea of re-working your entire site or theme isn't a viable solution.  Or maybe your site is just a single page and there isn't the need for a heading.  That said implementing an H1 as an image with appropriate alt text isn't a horrible solution.

What is not a good solution is implementing an H1 on an image just to hide overly spammy and descriptive alt text underneath the image and slide it in as an H1 on the page.

[virtualhandshake]

And if you need  a technical explanation on this, Rob, including some proof, here it is:

http://rob-hammond.co.uk/how-google-handles-alt-text-in-h1-tags

(look at the bottom what they have to say about other SEs besides google.)

also look at this, a similar question asked earlier in SEOmoz Q&A:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-images-work-as-a-h1

warm regards to all!