Menu Text or image?

[flanok]

I am asking anyone who has moved from text (anchor text) menu to an image driven menu, (obviously not javascript). And did it improve things, or does it not matter?

I am putting together a large finance site that will take up to 2 years to be of a size to deliver good rankings, against the big sites already out there.
I have worries though, that if by then it has say 8,000 pages with 8,000 internal anchor text menu links, this may be seen as spam.

The current sites, (competition) seem to use anchor text to internal pages, but a logo back to the home page. Is this the
accepted practice.in your opinion?

I am also not sure if the word "home" is ignored (as anchor text)when used as a text link to the homepage.

Has anyone experimented with what is accepted and what may be seen as spam?

Many thanks
Mark

[tedster]

I would never consider moving from text links to image links. Every time I've moved a site the other way -- from images to text -- search traffic has improved, and often impressively. Alt attributes do not hold the same punch in the algorithm as straight anchor text does. I'd have to assume that moving from text to images would cause a ranking and traffic drop.

Linking the logo back to the home page is a pretty widespread practice, but many users have no knowledge of it. So I question its usability as the only navigation to "Home."