Wrapping <h1> Tag Around Image, Verification required Options

[qwerty]

I have this handy FF extension that displays a word's definition when I double click on it. I double click "theme" and I get a little window that says, "A topic of discourse or discussion."

Here's the thing. A site has, or ought to have, a particular subject: a company, a product line, a person, a system of beliefs, a collection of works. If you want to call that a theme, I'm fine with that. It's also a subject, though.

A page within a site has it's own particular subject or subjects, which hopefully fit in as a piece of the site as a whole. If you want to call those topics, that's ok, but they're also themes.

Let's all remember that language's purpose is communication. The words are pretty much synonymous, and if you use them in such a manner that requires the person you're trying to communicate with that one must be a subset of the other, you're going to fail to communicate your idea (that is to say, your topic, your theme, your subject, your thesis, your message, your point).

My suggestion is that we say "the theme of the site" or "the subject of the site" and "the theme of the page" or "the subject of the page."

[Jill]

When you miss a point, Jill, you REALLY miss it!

I do like to be REALLY good at everything I do! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[torka]

Let's all remember that language's purpose is communication. The words are pretty much synonymous, and if you use them in such a manner that requires the person you're trying to communicate with that one must be a subset of the other, you're going to fail to communicate your idea (that is to say, your topic, your theme, your subject, your thesis, your message, your point).

Agreed, generally speaking. The problem in this specific instance is that the word "theme" has been appropriated by a subset of SEOs to describe a particular somewhat formulaic approach to SEO-ing a page or site.

Since this is an SEO-related forum, we have to be aware of any specific meanings that might have been assigned to otherwise innocuous words by others within our industry. We might disagree with their use of the word in that way, but unless we want to constantly confuse newbies (and spend a lot of time involved in discussions of semantics), it might simply be easier for us to avoid the use of the word "theme" and use "topic" or "subject" instead. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

My (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/penny.gif)

--Torka (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[mcanerin]

A couple of thoughts. I'm pretending I didn't read the rest of the thread (though obviously I did) because I don't want to get sidetracked from the original post (much). So this isn't in response to any particular post.

1. If you take an image, then add in ALT text, then surround the image with an H1 - it's H1 text. Feel free to check any text only browser (including the Google text only cache). I've tested it, it's not theory.

2. The main effect of an H1 is to call out certain types of text as important. Search engines appear to pay attention to this. However, if you "call out" the whole page (or a majority of it) using H1, or bold, or italic and so forth, then you are not really calling it out, are you? This now becomes the "normal" text for that page, and is treated as normal.

Avoid any so-called "SEO" who advises making large chunks of your site into H1, or bold, or whatever. Not only are they showing they don't understand how these work, but they are removing your ability to actually use that technique properly on the page. Not to mention the fact that, IMO, it's stupid and spammy (but that's just personal opinion).

3. A page can (and should) have a consistent message. I don't care whether you call it a theme, topic, or term vector space. With the exception of anchor text and some surrounding text to a link, the topic of the referring page isn't really relevant, in my experience. Otherwise multi-topic websites like forums, wikipedia, and directories would not work as well as they do.

As for the old "theming" idea for websites, as an SEO concept I believe it's debunked, though in theory I've nothing against the core idea of keeping your website focused on a certain topic. There is a LOT of baggage in addition to that which the original theory was espousing, most of which has been shown to be not true. See the previous paragraph for an example.

Ian

[qwerty]

If you take an image, then add in ALT text, then surround the image with an H1 - it's H1 text. Feel free to check any text only browser (including the Google text only cache). I've tested it, it's not theory.

If it's really treated as H1 text (it's really treated as H1 text????) that raises the question of whether it's abuse of the element.

[mcanerin]

I don't see why it would be considered an abuse, used properly. It's really no different than a noscript tag, except it's more of a "no image" or "no visual" alternative. From what I've seen, it's treated no differently than noscript content, nor should it be.

It's considered content, it's considered anchor text if the image is linked, and it's treated properly as a jump-to heading (H1) by screen readers, so it's helpful for people with seeing problems (which is my personal rule for whether or not I'm using an alt attribute properly).

Alternative content is not the same thing as spam. If you think about that, then you can see why proper document structure within alternative content (including headings) can and should be treated as proper document structure.

This isn't a search engine trick, it's a method to help the disabled properly understand the content of a website as best as possible.

Ian

This post has been edited by mcanerin: Jul 16 2006, 03:15 PM

[mcanerin]

This is not to say that the original scenario of the first post, where the entire text of the page was stuffed into an alt tag then turned into an H1 tag is a good idea.

The same rules would apply as if it were content - making the whole page an H1 is not only ineffective, it's spammy (IMO).

Not to mention the fact that Google only indexes the first 150 characters in any particular alt tag makes stuffing the content of a page in there for SEO purposes rather useless.

It would still help someone with a screen reader, though.

Ian

[qwerty]

I would think that the only proper use of this would be in the case of images of text being used as headings, with an alt attribute of the same text, and that would mean that a method like FIR is unnecessary, since it involves more code.

However, I don't imagine that, should an image fail to load, the alt attribute which happens to be in a heading tag would display the way the CSS has defined that tag. That would mean that there's still a use for FIR, but it's for a very limited number of users.

[mcanerin]

I would think that the only proper use of this would be in the case of images of text being used as headings, with an alt attribute of the same text, and that would mean that a method like FIR is unnecessary, since it involves more code.

I agree completely.

Ian

[qwerty]

Well, not that I don't trust you, but I'm testing this.

[Jill]

Oh ye of little faith, Bob! (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

[Alan Perkins]

ALT text wrapped in a H1 tag is H1 text. No question.

Wrapping the entire text content of a page in a H1 tag is generally a bad idea, whether or not it's ALT text. I recommend avoiding it.

[Michael Martinez]

ALT text wrapped in a H1 tag is H1 text.  No question.

Not according to the W3C. Whether a search engine will be fooled by this trick, I don't know.

But though I'm not usually one for praising the standards, the standards make no provision whatsoever for treating ALT= text as an HTML phrase element. As Jill and others here have pointed out in the past, ALT= text isn't even supposed to display (unless you disable the image display in your browser or use a text-only browser).

Google is well aware that most Webmasters don't follow the standards. They may be more flexible in some areas, but unless a lot of people are doing this, what incentive do they have for honoring such a convention?

Millions of people put "revisit-after" meta tags on their pages, and the one search engine that ever honored them is no longer active. I probably still have a few of them hanging around on older content. Seems like I've been cleaning them out of my pages for years.

But Google doesn't honor that tag, so the fact that it's widely used doesn't compel Google to do anything with it.

Hence, lacking any compelling reason to treat ALT= text as if it's explicit H1 text, they may not be doing so.

The parsing software would have to be coded to make the connection in some way. We don't know how they parse the text.

[qwerty]

Precisely why I'm testing this. It's one thing to see the alt attribute show up in a text browser, but I want to see how a search engine treats this. If anyone knows of any indexed pages using this method, let me know so that I can poke around a bit.

[mcanerin]

Whether a search engine will be fooled by this trick...

Huh? Fooled by what trick? Since when is an H1 tag a trick? Since when is Alt text a trick?

If you use an image as a header for a paragraph, then don't you think that the Alt text for that header should be, uh... a header?

This is very common for website designers, who want to use a nifty font or design to separate pages structure - they put it in an image. The fact that it's an image does not mean it's not intended to be part of the page structure - far from it.

Otherwise, you risk displaying something to the search engines that is different than what visually-abled visitors are seeing, no? That being something that is a header visually but not in code?

Your interpretation that this is not acceptable by the W3C is not supported by the link you provided (the fact that something is not expressly allowed does not indicate that it's expressly disallowed).

More clearly, if you put Bob's (qwerty's) test page through the W3C compliance checker, you will find that although the page does not comply strictly, none of the issues are related to the H1 and Alt. Also, checking that page in Watchfire (aka Bobby) shows no issues related to this.

So the W3C compliance checker finds no fault with it, it passes the usability checker, and it results in the content and structure available to sighted users being made available to non-sighted users (including search engines).

Can you spam with it? Sure, just like you can spam with all H1 tags and all Alt attributes. You can also spam with bold text, links and content, not to mention almost every other aspect of HTML and website design that a search engine can read.

I take great exception to the implication that I'm a spammer, or in any way misleading or tricking the search engines, visitors or website owners by using this for images used for document structure headers.

Ian