Is the Smart Slider SEO friendly?

Yes, it is. Search engines work in a way that they filter only the textual content from a website, without the HTML tags and CSS, JavaScript codes, plus the image alt tags. So in our slider, only the image alt tags matter and the text you write on the slides, and those will be automatically picked up by search engines. You can pick different heading tags, and the text layer is putting the text inside paragraphs. The slides' background images, and every layer, that uses an image has an alt tag. You can write something there, that is connected to the other parts of your website.

Alt tag for images

You can add alt tags to every image layer and slide background image.

Slide background image

You can find the field to enter your alt tag's content at the Slide settings → Style tab:

Image layers

You can find the field to enter the alt tag's content for every image layer at the Layer window → Content tab:

Texts

The text layer uses p tags, which for SEO purposes should contain description texts. The heading layer can use any selected div or h tag, where you should write titles. The main title could be h1, a subtitle h2 or h3 and so on, based on how important this text should be.

Lazy loading

Those images, which are loaded in by Lazy loading will not be visible for Google, since they do not exist on your website (which is the reason why Lazy loading increases your website's speed, since your site doesn't have to load those images).

Character animation

Since 2016, Google is able to run JavaScript codes on a page. This means the Google bot doesn't just looks the raw page source, but allows the content modifying JavaScript to do its job. Due to this change when you are using text animation on your headings, they will be read differently depending on your settings. Here is a simple example:

If you would like your text to be read as you have entered it, you should either turn off the split text animation, or create a new layer which is moved out of the canvas (or hidden in some other way), so it's not visible for the user. This new heading shouldn't have any Split Text animation on it, just the text of the original animation. Since Google will run the JavaScript code, it won't see the same text twice. It will see the first sentence from the example above, and depending on the Split text's settings, the second or the third one.

Affected layers/effects:

1. Heading layer (only when the Split text animation is used)
2. Animated heading layer
3. Highlighted heanding layer (only when at least two of these are used: before text, highlight, after text)

Image optimization

The Base64 embed option creates HTML codes from your images to optimize their loading. Google does not crawl images without urls, so these images won't show up on Google searches.

SEO plugins

SEO plugins such as Yoast SEO don't run shortcodes in the page so the result you get at the backend is not accurate. This does not mean your page is not SEO friendly - it just means that the backend result is not accurate because it does not take your full page content into account. Search engines such as Google's do look at the real page content which contains the texts from your sliders.

If you are using the SEO tools correctly, so basically, you're structuring your content using h1-h6 tags in the heading layers and enter the alt text for each image then your slider is SEO friendly.