Q: What is the importance of title tags for images in SEO? In the case of an image, is an image title as important as the ALT within the HTML code for the image?
A: It is generally thought that the Title tag for an image is ignored by Google. However, I would like to refer you to the Google SEO Starter Guide, which says that the “code base” of Google was mostly written in 1999/2000. The tags which didn’t exist at that time (think about CSS stylesheets) are usually not mentioned in the document.
The guide says that ALT attribute is important for images but nothing has been said about Title Tags or Javascript or CSS stylesheets.
So, I would say that:
- Title tag of each web page is very important
- Title tag of an image might not help but will not hurt as well. It turns into “hover text” when a visitor hovers over the image with mouse
- ALT attribute of the image tag is also very important
