Alt Tags vs. Title Tags for Images in WordPress: What’s the difference?
If you use WordPress, you’ve probably had experience uploading your own images. When you use the editor, you have a ton of options. What do they all mean?!
Let’s hold off on alternative text and title for a moment and explain the rest:
- Caption – The caption will appear on the page directly under the image.
- Description – The description is meant for search engines and will appear only in the source code. As you’ll learn soon, it may not be worth creating a description for your image.
- Link URL – When you click on the URL, where does it go?
- Alignment – Left, center, right. You pick!
- Size – I’ll let you figure this one out
Titles vs. Alternative text in WordPress
In the following two examples, we’re going to take a look at the difference in file name, title, and alt tag (or text) and how they appear within Google image search.
- Title: “search engine differences”
- Alt tag: “search engine differences”
- File name: search-engine-differences1.jpg
Google is showing the file name as the link to the image and pulling part of a sentence from the post to use as the description.
- Title: “maine seo image search for search engine differences”
- Alt tag: ”maine seo image search for search engine differences”
- File name: maine-seo-image-search.jpg
In this example, Google is again using the file name as the link to the image, but using the alt text for the description.
As it turns out, alternative text is better for search engines; while titles are better for your users. Titles are also what show up as the yellow box when you hover over the image.
So what can we learn about how Google Image Search works?
Google Image Search works a lot like Google web search.
They will pull the most relevant description: whether it’s the alt text, a section of text around the post, the title of the post, or even the title of the blog or website.
And that means…what?
Everything is important.
- The image file name is most important.
- Alt tags or text is more important than titles.
- The words around an image are important.
- Words on the page are also important. This screenshot shows Google pulling the title tag of the blog as the description of the image.
The takeaway
- Create keyword rich file names (and don’t forget to use dashes instead of underscores).
- Create a keyword rich alt text. Copy and paste the alt text as the title.
- Make sure your blog title, post title, and copy on the page (specifically those around the image) are also optimized.