In the world of search engine optimization, we want to be sure that viewers and search engines can read our websites with ease. The clearer your content, and the greater the quality…the better you will rank in Google and local search engines.
It’s unfortunate, but we see this all the time: text in graphics. These are two separate items and should always be separated. Graphics are there for a purpose, and there is a reason why a picture is worth a thousand words. Text should always be text because it allows written words to be search-engine friendly.
To this day, I still see a lot of websites with blurry or jagged text. I’m not talking about a necessary labels on a picture that’s not important to SEO…I’m talking about important information like e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and headings/titles that are actually presented as images instead of what they are…text!
When I come across one of these websites, I get curious. I start questioning the design and why the text would look “off”. I try to click it, and realize it cannot be highlighted or selected with my cursor. Eventually, I take a look at the background or image it’s beside and conclude that whoever designed this website did not have search engine optimization in his or her mind.
Some of the worst cases I’ve seen are websites whose header title (with company logo) is a big image file and the content (with a few paragraphs of text) is another big image below the header title. When you look at this website, you might not think anything is wrong with it. All the information is there, there’s an abundance of text, and you can find all the information you want on each of their pages. So what’s the problem? Well, what’s happening with these websites is that there is no way for any search engine to thoroughly crawl through the content of the website. To a computer or a search engine, what they’re seeing is two images: one on top and one on the bottom. They have no way of reading the text content in each of these images, and they have no way of judging its significance. As a result, the search engine ranking for this website would be quite poor and almost nonexistent.
Try it yourself! Look at the example below and see if you can highlight/select the text with your cursor! If you can’t, that means that the text is part of the image.
As you can see, you can’t select the “Bad” text on the image.
When getting a new website, be sure your designer is capable of both website design and search engine optimization. Nowadays, there is such a huge competition between businesses in the same field and without a website designer who knows how to get your name out on top, you may end up having to request another website designer or hire an SEO specialist to fix your website in the future.
CryoDragon is capable of designing pixel-perfect websites and we make an effort to get to know our clients and their business so that we can not only make their websites search-engine friendly, but also be able to write SEO-friendly content for them. If you’re looking for a new website, give us a call or send us an email!
Very Interesting! Didn’t know that text graphics were that bad. I know they’re annoying but didn’t realize the impact they had on search engines.
Nice post! Now that you mention it, I do see a lot of the ‘bad stuff’ online. Maybe some people just don’t care about search engine stuff.