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Today, I was in a meeting with a customer and their designer. My job had been to take the designer's template and integrate it with the shopping cart software. The designer had made many of the links for the navigation using images, and I had switched them to text. The customer asked me why the shopping cart didn't look exactly like the designer's work, and I pointed out that I had switched the images of text to actual text, because I felt the search engines would do a better job in following the links as well as seeing the anchor text.
At this point the designer cut in and told me that all we have to do is put alt text and the title attribute in the images, and they will have the same strength as text links.
I tend to differ, but I wanted to invite your opionions.
At this point the designer cut in and told me that all we have to do is put alt text and the title attribute in the images, and they will have the same strength as text links.
Actually you would put the title attribute on the <a href>, not the image. Use the alt attribute to properly describe the image. If the image reads Products and Services, then the alt attribute will be alt="Products and Services". Then for the link you would have <a href="" title="Visit our Products and Services Area"> It may appear to be repetitive but, according to usability research I've done, the above would be the proper way.
The alt attribute is used to describe the image. The title attribute is used to describe the destination of the link.
As far as how search engines treat them? I would prefer a text link over an image link anyday. There is much you can do with CSS to give that text some style. ;)
[edited by: pageoneresults at 3:56 am (utc) on Jan. 6, 2005]
I just needed someone to validate me. :)
lol! Let's run over to the W3C validator and verify that.
When nav buttons are up at the top of the page, I often purposely make them graphic so they don't precede the optimized text on the page (this is a consideration for pages using tables rather than CSS absolute positioning).
There's some concern that text down at the bottom might be filtered by the engines either because of position and/or because they're part of a template. If the latter is true, then all global nav is vulnerable. Try to cover yourself by also get text links in the paragraph content on your pages.
