Using Background-Image to Replace Text (FIR) etc..

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Charlie King wrote:

[..]

You suggest that making the image a link increases the chance of its
being indexed, which is good, but a) I still don't know if it'll get
H1 importance and b) I'm left with the problem of where to link all
of these headings to...

I'm no expert on SEO, and was hoping that someone else would step in
with more explicit advice; the only thing I can say is that I have a
bit of a long-standing reputation for the idea of providing
*meaningful* alt text (see the various materials below
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/alt/ , though some are quite dated
by now ), and it's been my experience that whenever I search for
information on various topics that are of interest to me, I get a bit
bored with getting shown my *own* URLs on those topics, at or near the
top of the list. So I must be doing something vaguely correct ;-)

It's a sad fact that the motives of the search engines are almost as
important as the motives of the readers when creating a site with any
kind of commercial bent. One ignores them at one's peril, no matter
how much one would like to make an exclusively user-oriented site.

Sure. And it seems pretty definite that the old "alt text stuffed
with keywords to fool the search engines" trick will stand a good
chance of getting a page disqualified, rather than really fooling the
indexers.

But I'm confident that the advice that I'm giving is at least
consistent with general good practice, and with what indexers do, and
with what would be useful to users (in fact, a company-logo-ish
heading that links to the company's "home" page is quite a reasonable
user /expectation/). What I can't tell you is the detail of just how
significantly the alt text features in each indexer's scale of values,
how seriously it takes <hN> markup, and so on.

I take note that you also want custom fonts for various sub-headers
too, but I don't think I can add a great deal of detail, so I'll leave
that aside and stick to general principles...

As a general rule, I'm all for following good-practice which is
consistent with the various ways in which web pages are used. What
I'd get upset about would be optimising a web page for one specific
purpose (e.g SEO) *if* that proved to be incompatible with some other
purpose (e.g text-mode accessibility).

I think that's about all I can usefully say, really. You need someone
with more-detailed knowledge of SEO to fill in details. A search (e.g
google) for the terms SEO with alt.text *may* bring useful
discussions, but, judging from what I found, one needs to read
carefully between the lines and understand where they're coming from
(at least one of the articles which I found, was clearly based on the
tacit assumption that the only commercial use of alt text was for
keyword stuffing, not for its documented purpose of providing genuine
*alternative* text), and any axes that they may have to grind.

good luck (we may also have strayed off-topic for the stylesheets
group, but as the thread was already established, I responded where I
found it. There may be postings elsewhere - try a search with
google-groups - which already address the more SEO-specific
questions. Just a suggestion.)

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:22:59 +0000, in
<Pine.LNX.4.62.0601161053130.1146 (AT) ppepc62 (DOT) ph.gla.ac.uk>
(comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets) "Alan J. Flavell"
<flavell (AT) ph (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

good luck (we may also have strayed off-topic for the stylesheets
group, but as the thread was already established, I responded where I
found it. There may be postings elsewhere - try a search with
google-groups - which already address the more SEO-specific
questions. Just a suggestion.)

Thanks for your advice, and I think that we both agree insofar as I
don't want to sacrifice either good practice or user experience in
achieving my aim of meeting the sponsor's typeface needs.

I absolutely *don't* want to try to fool search engines, I just want
to make sure that I don't suffer with them by trying to meet my first
needs.

I think we're still on topic here, as I'm sure that CSS is the answer
(or at the very least part of it).

I think that my policy will continue to be steering sponsors into
having a site that uses plain old HTML and CSS to suggest markup and,
where this steering fails, to use <hn><img...alt="heading text"></hn>
with the caveat that we don't really know what effect this will have
on SEO.
--
Charlie