Graphic Links or Text Links on my pages?

Have to decide which for client

[netnerd]

I have a client who is designing a widget site. They have a number of links on each page related to widgets and associated keywords.

These links were set up as graphics, but i told them to change them to be text links. I did this becuase i wanted to benefit from the text in these links both for the link text on the page they are on, and for the relevancy associated in turn to the pages they link too.

Did i make the right suggestion, or does link text not matter?

[Brett_Tabke]

Yes, link text has historically been the top criteria for Google rankings.

[netnerd]

Phew!

She wasnt too pleased when i told her at first.

Brett, would using an alt tag with the graphic link not have the same effect?

[Robert Charlton]

I try to keep clients happy by using graphic links at the top of the page. Graphics can say anything the client wants, look pretty, and not distract from search. I put my optimized text links as global links at the bottom of the page. I think you should have global text links at the bottom of your pages anyway.

There's more discussion about text links in these threads, and you can probably find more by using site search or by searching WebmasterWorld on Google:

Avoiding excessive repetition in global text links
[webmasterworld.com...]

Navigational Text
[webmasterworld.com...]

As mentioned in one of the threads, linking in paragraph text is another good way to introduce optimized anchor text.

...would using an alt tag with the graphic link not have the same effect?

Google isn't paying much attention, if any, to alt tags now, and I doubt if they ever gave them anything like the weight they give to link anchor text, which is considerable. I don't really think they give much weight to the title attribute in a link either, though that's probably better than the alt tag.

[fathom]

Use CSS and image background. Add text anchors with background highlights (rollovers > this is virtually no different than using image anchors.

[netnerd]

Fathom

Thats exactly what i advised!

[fathom]

Brett, would using an alt tag with the graphic link not have the same effect?

Adding is good for usability as well as the title="" attribute (for the link itself).

Do they help > probably yes > a little.