SEO benefits of terms used in Alt-tag, image name, page title

[CostumeD]

On our website, we have products that come in different colours, and we have created a different SKU for each one .e.g. our Acacia Evening Dress comes in 3 different colours (black, blue and red) - Acacia Evening Dress Black (J7048BLK), Acacia Evening Dress Blue (J7048RB), Acacia Evening Dress Red (J7048R).

Would it be beneficial for SEO if on the image Alt-tag we used the terms 'Jadore J7048 Red Acacia dress', 'Jadore J7048 Black Acacia dress' and 'Jadore J7048 Blue Acacia dress', because 'Acacia' is the internal name we have given to this dress, not the name provided by the label, Jadore, as more customers would search for terms such as 'black dress' or 'Jadore J7048'? Can we use the same terms in the Alt-tag on the image and the page title? How important is the Alt-tag in searching?

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

The purpose of alt tag is to describe the image if doesn't load and for visually impaired users, who use screen reader programs. So, i would go with more descriptive "black dress" than not-telling-me-anything "jadore 1234".

Also alt tag is used a lot in image search, so, if your business can benefit from image search, then it would make sense to include a little more details in alt tag than "black dress". Maybe something like "affordable jadore flared black dress - 'company name'".

Hope this helps.

[CostumeD]

Dear Dmitrii,

Thank you so much for your reply.  It is very helpful.

We are a bridal store selling wedding dresses and bridesmaids dresses. We are wanting to know how much our URL and page title can differ, whilst still optimising SEO.

For example, for the category Wedding Dresses, the url is wedding dresses, so can we use " the best wedding dresses in Sydney" in the page title?

For the bridesmaid dresses (URL is /bridesmaiddresses/) can we use " buy best bridesmaid dresses online in Australia"?

Can we use terms such as "buy best black dress in sydney", "buy online in australia" or "shop online in sydney" in the alt-tag, apart from the page title .i.e. adding extra keywords in the alt-tag that do not appear in the title? Would this be classified as keyword stuffing?

In our main categories .e.g. Wedding Dresses, can we add "best wedding dress store", "buy wedding dresses from best wedding store in sydney" in the alt-tag?

Thank you.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

You sure can add whatever you want. The question is about if it's going to help your SEO. If you going to have "buy online in australia" in title, meta, content, alt-tags then it is going to be overstuffing.

What you should be doing is "theme-ing" pages. Each page should target 1-2 related keywords with supportive content for those keywords (lets say pictures with related names, titles, alt-tags etc).

ALWAYS think of user experience. As I mentioned before - alt-tags are for when img does load or for visually impaired. So, if i get "best wedding dress store" instead of image of a dress - that's not cool. However, it would be ok to have something like "designer wedding dress - online store in sydney". Basically, you can incorporate descriptive, promotional and seo words together.

Hope this helps.

[NgEF]

Ecommerce marketplace for local classes here. We have over 3K SKUs on the site and I'd agree with what Dimitrii suggested. As an add-on to what he said, I'd also strongly suggest that you ensure the site's overall SEO architecture is well positioned to rank on a variety of keywords (depending on what your keyword research says of course).

For example,

• Our home page targets the broadest keywords (local classes etc.)

• Category pages targets 2nd tier keywords (baking classes, cooking classes etc)

• Product pages targets long-long-tail keywords (macaron baking class in the east)

I find that this approach works very well for ecommerce sites with a broad range of categories. In your case, Evening Dresses might be a category of it's own, with each SKU page ranking for its own long-tail keywords. As Dimitrii mentioned as well, image search does contribute a fair amount of traffic on it's own, and we've even received backlinks from site-owners who found our image via image search, and credited our site with a backlink

It's best to optimize the images you post up to be as descriptive as possible. Being an ecommerce site owner, I personally know your pain with hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, but cumulatively, it does make an impact and will help!