Using Image tag inside H1 tag

[salmisitara]

Hi,

Is it an acceptable SEO practice to use image tag inside H1 tag?

<h1> <img src = "" alt= "" /> </h1>

Will search engines treat Alt text of the image as h1 text?

[jimbeetle]

I believe Google uses the alt attribute as the text associated with the image, not sure of the other SEs.

What kind of image is this, something like a logo, or text representation to use an otherwise unsupported font for a heading? If it's the latter you might want to take a look at sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement).

[salmisitara]

thanks for your reply jim.

Actually yes I was trying to use the image in place of the text as H1 font is pixelated and does not look very clean.

Do you think using sIFR i wont be facing the aliasing problem? Also is there any drawback of using image tag inside h1? doesnt google or other search engines treat alt text as H1 in this case?

[jimbeetle]

Working backwards:

Well, you know, I can see a case for Google and the other SEs not treating it as an H1 rather than regular text as that would really be an easy way to throw a lot of spammy H1s onto a page. I would suppose though they have enough data to tell what's what and simply discount spammy cases when faced with it, and otherwise treating it as an H1. Maybe some other folks have a better take on this.

H1 font is pixelated and does not look very clean.

Sometimes there's just not much you can do about this. What looks good on your monitor might not look good on somebody else's, and vice versa. Before you go using image replacement I suggest first checking the text out on different monitors set at different resolutions.

[bradbox]

In the HTML specification, I don't think an <img> tag is allowed inside an <h?> tag anyway. So your HTML won't conform, and you'll get odd results in different browsers - so you might get a good ranking but your site might look rubbish in some browsers.

[jimbeetle]

They're both inline elements so should be no problem, but just to check, it turns out that <h1><img src="page.htm" alt="test image"></h1> validates fine.

[AussieWebmaster]

yeah but the emphasis of the h1 tag would not increase the imapct of the image link IMO

[beu]

Originally Posted by salmisitara

Hi,

Is it an acceptable SEO practice to use image tag inside H1 tag?

<h1> <img src = "" alt= "" /> </h1>

Will search engines treat Alt text of the image as h1 text?

he..he..he, most "acceptable SEO practices" or acceptable whitehat SEO practices at least, keep fairly inline with W3C standards. Since W3C uses this technique for their own logo on their own homepage, I'd say you're good to go!

<h1 id="logo"><img alt="The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)" height="48" width="315" src="/Icons/w3c_main" /></h1>

- http://www.w3.org/

Hope that helps and best of luck!

-Brian

[AussieWebmaster]

nice find brian

[beu]

thanks man, all luck though! One of those silly "SEO Trivia Questions" that you never expect to be asked.

[rapidvectorseo]

I don't see its valuable usage.