Thread:FishTank/@comment-3361105-20180507225752/@comment-4522253-20180510002529

Hatebunny wrote: My desire to use alt-text there was more for SEO, as you guessed. Understood, though adding alt-text to the images in that way will not significantly improve SEO for the mainspace article. Presumably, most searchable keywords will be in the body of the article if the cover image is actually relevant to the text. While I've never been a big fan of our gallery pages when we have image categories that serve the same function, the fact that galleries are curated is a positive. We've been talking about significantly limiting the number of images that can appear in one. From an absolutely ideal SEO solution, separate Gallery pages from the article are of limited utility. A more ideal solution would be galleries on the main page article, at the bottom. I had suggested "new" galleries because they're flexible for content, work well on both desktop and mobile, and can consistently be styled with CSS. That said, when you say there is no option to include alt-text in galleries, do you mean new galleries, regular old mediawiki galleries, or both? I had thought there might have been a way to do it within the older tags - but maybe I was mistaken. Either way, the hope is that limiting the number of images will allow us to add descriptive captions (though, perhaps not as descriptive as your example). No alt-text in old or new galleries (Help:Galleries,_Slideshows,_and_Sliders/wikitext). Regarding improving SEO by placing text on the File page of the image - it doesn't seem like our existing image template is working well in this respect. Is burying the description within a page-template preventing it from working altogether (I know it's not as good a practice as just putting text straight on the page). Is there anything we could be doing (i.e. more descriptive wordings in our "File Description" area)? Seems like we give plenty of info, but that none of it serves us well in terms of SEO. Quite possibly. Page-templates can become an automatic SEO killer if they use tables as the envelope elements, as Google doesn't parse through table tags (which is what necessitated the change to PIs from table-created infoboxes in the first place). A good, solid textual description should work well there. I understand, of course, how hard that would be to automate.