Warning: Graphic images of text

Designers and developers love to incorporate text and headlines into their image files. I finished a project tonight in which one entire page was turned into a graphic. Art, headlines, text, footer, the whole thing.

Looked good to me. But not to Google or Yahoo's search robots. The bots see just the title bar, the file name and perhaps some alt text.

If you write search-engine-aware copy, follow that work through the design process. Look at the finished page via the source code (under View in most browsers). You should see the heads, text and links. If not, find out why.

If you can grab the heads and/or text as a colored block and place it all on your desktop, you're dealing with an image.

Use of search-engine-aware copy is the No. 1 driver of placement on the SERPs -- search engine results pages. (I'm including title bar wording in that.)

Every other web site I've helped as an SEO had this problem of text buried in images. Often key terms appear only in banners that are really images. If you have a custom banner that says "Widgets for Small Business" and the file name is banner.jpg, guess what the search engines register. Java looks great, but has similar issues.

Now comes word that Google is working on a way to read text in images. About time. The technology has broader implications than this, but perhaps a side benefit will be to make SEOs and designers better friends.

Read more about Google's optical character recognition scheme.