SEO // Image Alt-Title Editing (and existence?!)
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Scott
Any chance of having alt-image tag editing at some point? It isnt just high up the SEO best practice list, but like all other aspects of SEO it evolves, and not only are they still relevant according to Google as recently as 4 months ago, but you should also be able to edit them as good SEO research spots new opportunities.
If they cannot be editable, product images should at least have the product name on the main image, but I cannot see this when I scrape my site?
With Google trying to leverage conversions from the image search pages, its pretty important if its not already present!
And you get (allegedly) a free page boost for following accessability best practice too.
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Scott
It would appear looking at my last couple of scans that the image alt tag non existence issue has got WORSE since the image file type change.
As this remains important to Google and other crawlers for SEO, we have already waited almost 4 years, and now a change has been implemented that has made this worse. Your priority may be speed improvements, but SEO is what brings visitors to the site in the first place to see how fast it is!
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime please can we have some update on this and it given more of a priority. Ignoring over 1900 warnings from our SEO tools (all 3 tools and GSC) every scan is a missed opportunity to improve SEO performance, on what is a fundemental SEO element. Thanks!
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Scott how has it got worse?
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Scott
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime the amount of images registering as totally empty content for alt-img has increased even further
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
Scott we’ve not changed the alt tagging.
If we could set them to the product name plus an image number would this help?
I have no available resource for the MT and database development to make them customisable in the mid term.
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Scott
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime Yes, this is the default of many other platforms, and would certainly help from an SEO perspective and will give a boost to Google image search results almost instantly 👍
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime
open
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Scott
Neil McQuillan - CEO Citrus-Lime as we head past the 3rd anniversary of this highly upvoted - and important - SEO requirement, can we have an update please? It’s been planned for 3 years so I am surprised in those 3 years it still not on the roadmap, and does need resolving whilst Google still puts relevance in alt-image titles for some search results and accessibility scoring? so for me and a lot of SEO people it’s a still important and it’s as always appearing in ahrefs, Moz to fix, and is used by Google for image search. Google last confirmed this in November 23
Thank you
Scott
Shirin Sadr
Ben Kippax Hey Ben - Is there any update on this? It was marked as planned some time ago. We're also keen to see the 2022 Roadmap especially with the planned investment in Ecomm. Would be good to see what that looks like - is there news on its release?
Ben Kippax
Hi Shirin Sadr:
We've not yet added this to our roadmap.
It's not my place to share the entire roadmap for development I am afraid. I'm sure it's a discussion that could be had but I'm not the person to share that information.
What I can share is that our priorities at the moment are
* Payment Service Providers Directive V2 (PSD2) and Strong Customer Authentication (SCA)
* Heavy architectural and speed improvements
** This will help pave the way for future developments
Ben Kippax
planned
Ben Kippax
under review
This post was marked as
planned
Ben Kippax
Steven Sproat @scott-hargrave-skiers-lounge-consultant This is an interesting topic and one that deserves a fairly lengthy discussion about the general accessibility and our adherence (or not) to A11y web accessibility standards.
I'll flag this for discussion with the ecommerce dev team.
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Steven Sproat
Hi, this is because images aren't displayed using a traditional HTML <img> tag; the image is shown via a background image applied using CSS to a <div>, so no alt tag can be applied.
I'd argue that this approach is wrong, as background-images with CSS are exactly that - visual presentation. A product image is actually part of the page content.
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Scott
Steven Sproat: yepp, Bingo!