Image Anchor link?

How to anchor an image?

[JaxJaxJax]

I have a question, I am new to html, and we have a new website and I have had people looking at it. I was told by a guy that the subpages are not being indexed by google, because the links on the homepage are not anchor text.

I am not sure what this forum policy is about posting websites so I will substitute our site name.

The current link:
<div id="servicesb"><a href="services.html" title="services"></a></div>

Now the link on the page is a picture not text, is this what he is talking about by not being anchored, because it is obviously linked?

Thanks in advance,

J

[dannibecher]

What the guy means is that there is no anchor text in the link, this means that Google and other search engines will not recognise it as an actual link, rather an images linking to a page and will therefore not follow the link (i believe)When the robots read a page they "ignore" images.

[JaxJaxJax]

How do I go about getting google to index my images. Or do I have to put actual text for it to get crawled?

[tedster]

That's more of a question for the Google Search forum, but the short answer is that Google's Image Search is only rarely updated and there are many challenges beyond just the code on the page - including the Safe Search filter.

You can use our Site Search on [Google Image Search] [google.com] to find the discussions.

You can place an image in an anchor, and the code you need looks something like this:

<a href="services.html" title="services"><img src="imagename.jpg" alt="services image" width=11 height=22></a>

...and the alt attribute should have a text string that describes the image. It's not as powerful for search as using true anchor text would be, but it does have some value for the search engines.

While Google is experimenting with OCR, if you want to see an image related to a certain keyword, you should begin with surrounding text for the image, and also using an alt attribute in the <img> element.

[rocknbil]

Throwing this out there, rip apart as you see fit . . .

Would this give a positive effect? I ask because it's an approach I've considered, but not knowing if it would be negative, I've gone with tedster's suggestion:

.anchor_class span { display:none; }

<a class="anchor_class" href="somelink.html"><span>Some Relevant Text</span></a>

You can still style anchor_class to block, width, height, as desired but it's textual content is hidden. My concern is whether the SE's will kill the page for "hidden text."

[JaxJaxJax]

Would my problems be fixed if I put a navigation bar at the bottom of each page that links to all my pages? Then I can leave my site the way it is without changing graphics?

Thanks
J