The trouble with graphics by Ecklund Marketing Group

The Trouble with Graphics

A big blunder that some webmasters make is to design sites that are nothing more than an assortment of graphics pieced carefully together like an online jigsaw puzzle. These sites can be visually very appealing because you can use fancy fonts that otherwise would not display properly and minimize the risk of the pages looking different from one browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc). But there's an enormous trade-off involved: search engines hate these sites because they're beautiful!

Search engine robots cannot read text that's incorporated into an image, so all of your content is rendered useless from an SEO perspective. It's important to keep your graphics and your text as two separate elements. When you do use images, make sure that you add ALT text to each one. Alt text is what you see in the little yellow box that pops up when you mouse over some images. It gives some information about the picture in question i.e. "A photo of our Family Law team'.

Graphics are frequently used as navigation links. There's nothing wrong with that, provided you include HTML links at the bottom of each page. The bots will be able to follow the image link without difficulty, but it can't read the embedded text, so you lose the anchor text advantage.

We don't recommend that your index page be one huge graphic. While using proper meta tags will ensure that Yahoo appreciates your site's content, Google ignores meta tags these days and dives directly into page text. If your index page, the gateway to your site, has no text to feed it, the Googlebot will go away unsatisfied. Graphic elements will always take a back seat to good copy.

See what we can do for your business at: www.ecklundmarketinggroup.com