Question : Can an alt tag be placed inside an H1 tag?

I wanted to jazz up my website and make the headers, which are in H1, now images. I would do an alt tag for those, but is it possible/SEO approved to place that alt tag inside the H1 tag?

Answer : Can an alt tag be placed inside an H1 tag?

no.  Search engines will ignore any alt value on an H1 tag.  alt is not supported by H1.

If you convert it to an image then you are going to lose any advantage that the H1 text might have had.

You might want to try making that background image a "blank" image with no text.  Then you could make it the background-image of the H1 tag but still just put text into the H1 tag as normal.  You'd get the best of both worlds.

So something like the following:

Pictures