Megan — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:03:57 +0000

The CSS image replacement thing is one option, but don't rely on it too much. Search engines are starting to learn to read CSS, and will learn how to identify when something is being hidden with CSS. Then they may not use the words that you just hid (see more info here). I tend to use this message rather than putting the image in and using an ALT tag on it. But that's because the image is mainly presentational and doesn't provide extra information to the user. Logos are sort of borderline here, because they do provide information, but in a visual form.

That said, your this represents one small part of an overall SEO strategy. You will want ot make sure your keywords appear on your page, that you have lots of good text content for the SE to read, that it can follow the links around your site (they are not done in Flash or javascript), and many other things. Meta tags aren't very important for search engines anymore, but you should at least have them and try to make sure they are unique for every page.

No need to apologize for asking, we were all beginners once!

D@K$! — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 08:54:34 +0000

Thank you for your input guys x

andy206uk — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 19:43:57 +0000

Or... like I posted in another thread use 'CSS image replacement' to style your h1 to look like a graphic..

demonhale — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 02:51:17 +0000

As Frank suggested, use the image alt tag so that your header will be sort of read by the SE's...

refresher:

FrankR — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:57:52 +0000

The process by which a computer can "read" the text in an image is called optical character recognition (OCR) and it's very computationally expensive. None of the search engines are using it to try read "text" that lies in pictures.

That being said, you can put any text you want in the image's ALT tag. The search engine robots, the programs that index web sites for search databases, will read that.

Actually, it is good that large scale OCR processes are not currently in use, except by national intelligence agencies. That allows use to still use images to hide our e-mail addresses from spammers while allowing a legit visitor to read it.

I hope this helps.

Frank