Text in Images vs. Alt tags

[monster99]

Hi on my homepage i h ave multiple images They have the appropriate alt text for each image, but the text which the image displays is not written into the page and styled using CSS rather than placing text within an image.

Is this a issue worth correcting, or is it sufficient to have just alt text for each image.

Any major pros from having putting the text in the image into the CMS using appropriate CSS styling to achieve the same effect.

[EGOL]

Don't take chances.  Put any text that you want search engines to see out there where visitors will see it - in text.

[RyanKent]

I strongly prefer all text to be displayed as HTML text rather then embedded in images.

PROS:

• text can be changed very quickly as needed. This is helpful for translations, keyword changes, etc. Changes of images may require a designer and developer whereas a text change can often be done by a site owner.

• any time an image is updated, you either have to update the site's code or deal with caching issues where some users will see the old image

• search engines can always read the text and there is a 100% confidence what is being read by the crawler is also being viewed by users

CONS:

• If you desire a very specific font or styling, it could be altered by various browsers at times. This can easily be avoided by either choosing from one of the many popular fonts or using CSS3 to make the font available to the viewer

Tests have been performed to show currently Google evaluates alt text and html text equally. I strongly believe at some point this will change. Google strongly desires to align their evaluations with the user experience. Alt text is very commonly manipulated whereas text can be trusted to a much higher degree.

[danatanseo]

Great question. Yes, it would be much better to put the text on the page via the CMS with CSS to achieve the same look as you have right now. The reason is that a SE spider cannot crawl text that is embedded in an image. All the spider will "see" is that it is an image containing whatever is described by your "alt" attributes. If you want search engines to be able to "read" that content, I would recommend going the route of making it actual text styled in conjunction with the image you want via CSS as you propose.

Hope that helps!

Dana