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SmartCraw: first keyword and alt activated but still asked to activate it.

I have the focused keyword on the first paragraph of my content and also have ALT tag value for images. Still, SmartCrawl is showing I’ll have to add the focused keyword in the first paragraph and alt as well.

Fri, 8 Feb 2019 4:49:33
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  • Adam
    • Support Gorilla

    Hello Philipp Ludwig

    I hope you’re well today and thank you for your questions!

    Let me start wit the “First paragraph has no keywords” issue. The focus keyword defined for this page is “Logo” and while I can see it in the “first paragraph” on the page this is not actually… first paragraph.

    There’s no way for the script to recognize what’s a first paragraph according to “human perception” and it must rely on the HTML tags that constitute the page. There’s a HTML specification and it says that the “paragraph” is a text inside “<p> /</p>” tags. To comply with HTML specs, that tag should be used to enclose the content text on the page. But since it’s a “block” element it’s often (mis)used to e.g. position some other things on the page.

    In this case the real first paragraph on the page is in fact a logo – the one in the top-left corner. It can be be seen by looking into page source code. There is indeed no keyword, in fact there’s no text at all :slight_smile: Hence, the plugin scans the page (it does it from “outside” – it checks the page on front end) and finds first “paragraph” so first pair of HTML “p” tags.

    Therefore this warning is valid and actually means that the theme doesn’t use quite proper HTML markup. While this is not a “sin” and is quite a common practice, it’s a misuse of the “p” tag. It could be fixed by making sure that the “p” tag is used no where in theme template files above the real page/post content starts but in this case you can safely ignore it in my opinion. The crawlers scan the page and since the keyword is actually used on page in its “main part” that should suffice.

    Then, the second issue is “Image Alts have no keywords”.

    This is a bit different. Again, the keyword here is “Logo” and it is actually used in the “alt” tags which is fine. However, there’s an issue that the plugin is still (it was on purpose initially back when the plugin was created) requesting all of the “alt” tags on a page to include keyword. In this case only some of them include it – which makes sense but triggers this warning. It also can be safely ignored here as there already “alt” tags containing the keyword and other than this, “alts” should contain “meaningful text” (as Google likes to call it).

    That being said, I’ll discuss that with our developers as I believe we should address that in future releases so it should rather be requesting either “at least one” or “at least %” of “alts” to have keywrods instead of all. As of now, as long as there actually are any “alt” tags on the page (and there are in this case) that contain keyword, you’re fine and despite the warning it won’t affect SEO negatively.

    If you have any additional questions, let me know please.

    Kind regards,

    Adam