• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        4. Combining images with text as anchor text

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Combining images with text as anchor text

        Intermediate & Advanced SEO
        3
        6
        2267
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • fablau
          fablau last edited by

          Hello everyone,

          I am working to create sub-category pages on our website virtualsheetmusic.com, and I'd like to have your thoughts on using a combination of images and text as anchor text in order to maximize keyword relevancy.

          Here is an example (I'll keep it simple):

          Let's take our violin sheet music main category page located at /violin/, which includes the following sub-categories:

          • Christmas

          • Classical

          • Traditional

          So, the idea is to list the above sub-categories as links on the main violin sheet music page, and if we had to use simple text links, that would be something like:

          Christmas
          Classical
          Traditional

          Now, since what we really would like to target are keywords like:

          "christmas violin sheet music"

          "classical violin sheet music"

          "traditional violin sheet music"

          I would be tempted to make the above links as follows:

          Christmas violin sheet music
          Classical violin sheet music
          Traditional violin sheet music

          But I am sure that would be too much overwhelming for the users, even if the best CSS design were applied to it. So, my idea would be to combine images with text, in a way to put those long-tail keywords inside the image ALT tag, so to have links like these:

          Christmas
          Classical
          Traditional

          That would allow a much easier way to work the UI , and at the same time keep relevancy for each link. I have seen some of our competitors doing that and they have top-notch results on the SEs.

          My questions are:

          1. Do you see any negative effect of doing this kind of links from the SEO standpoint?

          2. Would you suggest any better way to accomplish what I am trying to do?

          I am eager to know your thoughts about this. Thank you in advance to anyone!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • fablau
            fablau last edited by

            Any more thoughts on this?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • fablau
              fablau @SamuelLavoie last edited by

              Thank you Samuel for your reply as well.

              Yes, what you describe is exactly what I also learned: no need to be too much "redundant" about keywords, but SEs will understand from the surrounding context... well, fact is some of our competitors are doing what I am suggesting here and they are dominating the 1st spot on Google for most of the keywords we are competing with. They also have a more clear "siloed" category-sub-category structure than us, which suggests this technique combined with the siloing technique help a great deal (also, note that for most category pages we compete with, we have much more external links than them! Hence my though that a more clear, siloed structure could help)

              And of course, anything we do is with the user in mind: ALT text is always meant for users first, but I don't see harm in being a little bit redundant on that if it could help with SEO as well, don't you?

              Thank you again very much, and please, any additional idea you may have is very welcome!

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • fablau
                fablau @RobCairns last edited by

                Thank you Rob for your extensive reply.

                I see what you mean, and I am aware of that. This "link technique" suggestion is part of a bigger plan I am working on where the goal is to create a more "siloed" structure to increase topical relevancy as I have discussed on this other thread of mine:

                https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/community/q/panda-rankings-and-other-non-sense-issues

                And even though that's a minor thing, everything adds up. For example, we have recently moved from http to https and that's also is a minor thing, but adds up with all other improvements we are working on.

                As for your suggestion:

                "I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe."

                I don't exactly understand what you mean, are you talking about our own produced Music Expert videos or the YouTube videos inside our product pages submitted by the users?

                Thank you again

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • SamuelLavoie
                  Samuel Lavoie @RobCairns last edited by

                  Agreed with Robert, that is a minor optimization but I don't see negative effect SEO wise.

                  Yes, exact match anchor texts can be powerful, but nowadays search engines rely less on it directly and will leverage text found near the links themselves and elsewhere on the page. Let say having this structure should have a pretty similar impact on giving anchor text weight :

                  <nav>

                  More violin sheet music categories

                  Christmas
                  Classical
                  Traditional
                  </nav>

                  Besides SEO, another thing to consider is the fact that screen readers will read the text in the alt attribute. Think about how it could help (or not) a user to hear : "graphic link christmas violin sheet music" "graphic link classical violin sheet music", etc.

                  Hope this helps with an added perspective on alt attributes.

                  fablau 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                  • RobCairns
                    RobCairns last edited by

                    Hi Fabrizo,

                    I think I understand what you are asking here, but if not please feel free to rephrase or correct me.

                    Based on what you are saying, you seem to be going for exact match keywords linked through image alt text for maximum relevancy to your targeted search terms. There aren't really any "problems" with this, but you may be going after a red herring here, even if your competitors are doing well with this tactic:

                    a) There is no guarantee that this tactic is what is generating the ranking results for their targeted search terms

                    b) Alt tags and exact match keywords don't carry much weight in terms of your overall ranking potential. That comes from links, content, architecture and various other factors.

                    I think that you may be expending a bit too much energy on relatively minor factors when you might consider beefing up your link profile, expanding your content base, improving your user experience, etc. This is especially true when you start getting into sub categories - if you are constantly working on the small details you lose the forest because of the trees.

                    So, to answer your questions directly:

                    1. No, I don't think there is anything "negative" that will come from this strategy.

                    2. Yes, I think that this strategy will move the needle but in a very small way compared to building a few powerful, genuine links from relevant sources in your industry. Build up your content, give readers something about violins to be interested in. I took a look at your site and the first thing I would consider is replacing the example music videos from your specific instruments pages to your home page so visitors know what kind of quality they are getting if they subscribe.

                    It's an uphill battle since your site is effectively an e-commerce store and therefore features a lot of images and uncrawlable content in videos, but adding some content about the value of your service, building links to your category/subcategory pages and improving the user experience is probably where you will get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of rankings.

                    Hope this helps - I'm always available if you would like to discuss further. Feel free to PM me at any time.

                    Cheers,

                    Rob

                    SamuelLavoie fablau 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 3
                    • 1 / 1
                    • First post
                      Last post

                    Browse Questions

                    Explore more categories

                    • Moz Tools

                      Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                    • SEO Tactics

                      Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                    • Community

                      Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                    • Digital Marketing

                      Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                    • Research & Trends

                      Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                    • Support

                      Connect on product support and feature requests.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • RyanMeighan

                      Why are my site images hosted by secureservercdn.net?

                      All of my image links are hosted on secureservercdn.net. for example, if i go to a webpage, mydomain.com/blog/blog-post and right click any image with a "copy image address" the images are all linking to secureservercdn.net/blablabla rather than mydomain.com/wp-uploads/blalblabla. this cannot be good for SEO. Any ideas why this would be? My site is hosted through GoDaddy, is it on their end? Thanks, Ryan

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanMeighan
                      0
                    • Kingalan1

                      Removing Toxic Back Links Targeting Obscure URL or Image

                      There are 2 or 3 URLs and one image file that dozens of toxic domains are linking to on our website. Some of these pages have hundreds of links from 4-5 domains. Rather than disavowing these links, would it make sense to simply break these links, change the URL that the link to and not create a redirect? It seems like this would be a sure fire way to get rid of these links. Any downside to this approach? Thanks, 
                      Alan

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                      1
                    • seowork214

                      Using the same image across the site?

                      Hi just wondering i'm using the same image across 20 pages which are optimized for SEO purposes. I was wondering is there issues with this from SEO standpoint? Will Google devalue the page because the same image is being used? Cheers.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seowork214
                      0
                    • plahpoy

                      Thought FRED penalty - Now see new spammy image backlinks what to do?

                      Hi, So starting about March 9 I started seeing huge losses in ranking for a client. These rankings continue to drop every week since and we changed nothing on the site. At first I thought it must be the FRED update, so we have started rewriting and adding product descriptions to our pages (which is a good thing regardless). I also checked our backlink profile using OSE on MOZ and still saw the few linking root domains we had. Another Odd thing on this is that webmasters tools showed many more domains. So today I bought a subscriptions to ahrefs and instantly saw that on the same timeline (starting March 1 2017) until now, we have literally doubled in inbound links from very spammy type sites. BUT the incoming links are not to content, people seem to be ripping off our images. So my question is, do spammy inbound image links count against us the same as if someone linked actual written content or non image urls? Is FRED something I should still be looking into? Should i disavow a list of inbound image links? Thanks in advance!

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | plahpoy
                      0
                    • alphonseha

                      Google not Indexing images on CDN.

                      My URL is: http://bit.ly/1H2TArH We have set up a CDN on our own domain: http://bit.ly/292GkZC  We have an image sitemap: http://bit.ly/29ca5s3 The image sitemap uses the CDN URLs. We verified the CDN subdomain in GWT. The robots.txt does not restrict any of the photos: http://bit.ly/29eNSXv. We used to have a disallow to /thumb/ which had a 301 redirect to our CDN but we removed both the disallow in the robots.txt as well as the 301. Yet, GWT still reports none of our images on the CDN are indexed. The above screenshot is from the GWT of our main domain.The GWT from the CDN subdomain just shows 0. We did not submit a sitemap to the verified subdomain property because we already have a sitemap submitted to the property on the main domain name. While making a search of images indexed from our CDN, nothing comes up: http://bit.ly/293ZbC1While checking the GWT of the CDN subdomain, I have been getting crawling errors, mainly 500 level errors. Not that many in comparison to the number of images and traffic that we get on our website. Google is crawling, but it seems like it just doesn't index the pictures!? Can anyone help? I have followed all the information that I was able to find on the web but yet, our images on the CDN still can't seem to get indexed.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alphonseha
                      0
                    • Malika1

                      If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?

                      Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika1
                      1
                    • Sam-P

                      Would changing the file name of an image (not the alt attribute) have an effect of on seo / ranking of that image and thus the site?

                      Would changing the file name of image, not the alt attribute nor the image itself (so it would be exactly the same but just a name change) have any effect on : a) A sites seo ranking b) the individual images seo ranking (although i guess if b) would be true it would have an effect on a) although potentially small.) This is the sort of change i would be thinking of making : ![Red ford truck](2554.jpg) changed to ![Red ford truck](6842.jpg)

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sam-P
                      0
                    • fablau

                      Number of images on Google?

                      Hello here, In the past I was able to find out pretty easily how many images from my website are indexed by Google and inside the Google image search index. But as today looks like Google is not giving you any numbers, it just lists the indexed images. I use the advanced image search, by defining my domain name for the "site or domain" field: http://www.google.com/advanced_image_search and then Google returns all the images coming from my website. Is there any way to know the actual number of images indexed? Any ideas are very welcome! Thank you in advance.

                      Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau
                      1

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    • Digital Marketers
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.