Home Page Design and SE spidering

[Trey]

If you place your 200 - 250 word description over a home page back ground image, will the search engines still be able to spider and recognize that as visible content? The text will not be an image, but lay over an image.

thanks

[Marcia]

Welcome to WmW, Trey.

Yes, spiders will be able to pick up the text - it's done by picking it up from the code. However, for safety and visitor usability, make sure your text is enough of a contrasting color, different from any bgcolor used on the page, so that it won't be considered invisible text, and will be easily readable.

[agerhart]

Trey,

Welcome to Wmw!

In response to your question...yes, the search engines will be able to spider the content, as long as the text is not an image. Whether or not the background is an image does not affect the text content on the site.

[agerhart]

Marcia.....ya beat me!

[Trey]

Yes we will be placing either white or yellow text over a blue background.

Thanks for your help.

T

[Marcia]

Trey, you've hit on a pet peeve issue of mine. I often see wonderful pages with either black or very dark blue backgrounds (or background images) - and unfortunately, I cannot read the text at all. It's also often impossible to read the links, whether link, alink or vlink.

It's still a very dramatic and effective type of design, but if I can't read the text or see the links to click on, I'm gone. Make sure and check the readability in different lighting. What shows in bright light might not show if the site visitor is viewing from a dimly lit room.

[stuart]

Also watch out for how different browsers render your page, you may find your image and text doesn't line up the same all across the board. (browser versions, pc's, mac's etc). Also remember people's monitor colour settings are always different so maybe check your page by adjusting your own monitor through a range of settings.

[Trey]

Follow-up to this question.

I have been checking out sites that come up at the top of searches for our relevant keywords and very few of these sites have a 250+ word introduction on their home page.

I had originally designed our home page as just several image map links. Is it really necessary to add this 250+ word keyword intro to the home page?

[Macguru]

I read somewhere that some search engines weight more importance to the index page than any other in the site.