Tim Flight

One of the bigger struggles I have as a website developer is explaining to people the difference between actual text, and a graphic image of text. Think of the photographs from your last vacation. Do you have any photos of yourself or your family beside a sign showing where you were? (If not, just pretend you did.)

What you have is a picture of that sign. It is on your computer (you do have a digital camera, don’t you?) but it would be silly to think that you can edit the text on the sign like you can edit text in a word processor. It doesn’t work like that because you took a picture of text… it isn’t really text.

Website designers often fall for this as well. In order to make the text look perfect, fancy text is often created in a graphics program and then saved as an image. That image is then placed on the webpage. It isn’t text anymore, is it? Now, just like you can’t edit the sign in your vacation photo (without a graphics program) a computer can’t “read” the text if it is actually an image. That fancy text you just placed on your website now can’t be indexed by a search engine.

“So What?” you say. “Most of my website is made of text, just a few headings are graphics!” Don’t these headings summarize your page? Aren’t those good keywords someone might type into a search engine? Well then they better be text!

Enter SEO Browser. Enter in your website address and see what your website looks like to a search engine. Keep these points in mind:

• Search engines tend to place more weight on text near the top of the page. Are your most important keywords and key-phrases visible near the top of the results?
• Is your website’s main set of navigation near the top of the SEO Browser’s results? It shouldn’t be! Isn’t your website’s content more important than the navigation in terms of search engine optimization? Note that this doesn’t mean navigation controls should be at the bottom of your site. There are ways to have the navigation on the top of your site when a human visits a website but have it placed lower in the website’s code so that search engines see it last.
• Are your important keywords and phrases shown (in the SEO Browser results) in larger text than other text on the page?
• Is there any text missing in the SEO Browser results? If so then that text is probably comprised of an image rather than real text. Grab a website developer that knows good CSS and make some fantastic looking text!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 10:15 am and is filed under SEO Search Engine Optimization, Web Tools. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.