ZydoSEO - 12:44 am on Oct 25, 2010 (gmt 0)

Why not have both?

If it is something that is relatively static, you can make it a text link with text link text but have it display as a logo image in the browser.

I do this for all of my site's logo images in the header of each page. It gives me a text link from each page back to my home page with the targeted keyword phrase as the link text instead of an image link with alt text which carries less weight.

I use something like the following in the HTML to render the logo image in the header:

<div id="site-logo"><a href="/">targeted keyword phrase for the home page</a></div>

then in the CSS something like

#site-logo a {
bacground: url("/images/logo.png") no-repeat blah blah blah;
display: block;
...
}


I like this better even for accessibility. I mean, it looks to screen readers (and those with images turned off) like a pure text link. The link text actually describes the page that is being linked to UNLIKE an image link with proper alt text would (since the alt attribute should describe the image, NOT the page linked to).

If I have an image of a family standing in front of a house that links to a Refinance page, my alt text should "technically" describe the image, "Family standing in front of white house with picket fence."

So this gets read to a blind person... It gives them no clue what the page being linked to is about. Using a text link with appropriate link text describing the page being linked to and CSS to associate a background image with it gives me the best of all worlds IMO:

1) Crawlers see a text link with real link text describing the page being linked to
2) Browsers w/ images turned off and screen readers (neither of which can "see" an image) are presented a text link with real link text describing the page being linked to
3) Browsers w/ images turned on see the image itself

I am sure some purists will think this is a bad idea from an accessibility perspective. But my friend who is totally blind and works for Microsoft said he prefers this experience.

It would be tough to do with dynamic content unless you generate the CSS for the images as inline CSS (or generate external CSS files when images/links changed and have a process to push them out to the server(s)).

Just an idea...