Title Attribute

What’s the Difference: Image Alt Text vs. Image Title Attributes

Image alt text is used to describe your image textually so that search engines and screen readers (software used by the visually impaired) can understand what that image is. It’s important to note that using alt text correctly can enhance your SEO strategy. On the other hand, the image title tag is simply used to provide an image with a title, but it’s less important for SEO than the alt tag. 

Your image tag should always include the following two attributes: image alt text and image title.

How can I optimize the image title attribute?

The image title attribute doesn’t have any impact on keyword rankings because search engines don’t crawl them, so if you had to choose between optimizing alt text vs. titles, you should choose the former every time. That said, image titles are displayed when your mouse hovers over an image in some browsers (like Firefox and Opera), so having a proper title set does enhance the user experience. You don’t need to do anything crazy here; just write a quick and easy title for the image that complements what you’ve already written for the alt text, and you can call it a day.

When you optimize the alt text and titles in images, it is important to make sure that you focus on the following:

• Will this alt text and title text help my users?
• Will this alt text and title text satisfy user intent?
• Will this improve the user experience?

Image SEO key takeaways

In the context of the image tag, alt text is used to describe visual elements to users who can’t see them, either because the image failed to load or because they are using a screen-reader. The image title attribute is only visible on mouse-over and displays just the image title. Alt text has potential SEO benefits, but image titles do not. Make sure all of your images include alt text (with relevant keywords included), and ideally, an image title as well.