Do images work as a H1

[EAOM]

Is a h1 tag wrapped image with a optimized alt tag as effective as text wrapped in a h1 tag?

[Theo-NL]

No. Actual text is slightly more effective than an image alt text. You might want to have a look at CSS image replacement techniques?

[RyanKent]

The functional purpose of H1 tags is to identify sections of text so CSS formatting can easily be applied such as text size, bold, font, etc. Those text modifiers don't apply to images.

I checked and enclosing an image within a H1 tag is actually valid HTML as per the W3C standards.

I doubt this idea has ever been tested to see if the alt tag was given any increased importance because it was contained in a H1 tag. I would not believe it would as the entire point is bold or enlarged text increases visibility, whereas ALT text is not visible to most readers.

This is an instance where you are making a change that does not benefit users in an effort to manipulate search rankings. I wouldn't suggest it as helpful.

[seomagnet]

Most crawlers that I've used has not recognised the H1 tag wrapped in Alt text used on one of our sites. Once we have used the normal H1 tag we have seen a good increase in one of the keywords we have tried to rank for a while.

[Syed1]

Really interesting that you ask this as I have just recently been researching on this exact same thing. A website where we had 4 H1 tags on homepage (not a good thing!) needed to change - to keep it to just 1. I did not want to introduce new keyword phrase and I struggled to find an existing keyword/title phrase that I could wrap the H1 with. For a sometime I was considering making the logo as H1 as the logo images ALT  had the websites main keywords in it but from research and non-scientific test on a dummy site, I found that its not very affective at all.

To some extent, the effect is like an image backlink - Google does not greatly value the ALT of the image that is linking to you, as it would, had the backlink been from a text link with anchor text.

[zharriet]

UX: if the image is missing for some reason, the Alt Text will be formatted as H1 and have to fit inside the image area. Not a pretty picture at all.

[Gaveltek-173238]

I agree 100% with what Theo is saying. The use of CSS to replace images has gotten to a point (from a purely aesthetic standpoint) that you cant tell the difference anymore. It is effective and considered best practice to use text when possible. It compounds your pages SEO weight and can edge out your competition if they are using images as opposed to CSS to render text in its place. Style Sheets RULE!