Images at the top of the page or text for SEO?

[Mandala72]

Hi

I have an art site where images are of particular importance.
I have four images at the top of my home page 2 on 2 rows, with my main text directly below them.

My question:

Is this going to have an impact on the SEO qulaity of my site, or should i consider having some text above them (which would not look visually quite as effective?)

Cheers

Pete

[mack]

I think you have answered your own question...

which would not look visually quite as effective

If ever you are going to make changes, always think of the user first. Placing your text in a different place may have soome slight effect, but the site may not serve its users as well. Is a slight gain in traffic worth a loss of conversions.

Mack.

[dailypress]

Many popular websites have a header banner, so I think youll be fine with images on the top.

[edited by: mack at 3:13 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2010]
[edit reason] Removed specifics [/edit]

[Quick Linx Wireless]

I saw many sites those have the banner on its top so i think you have to have image on top of your site. I think it will be fine.

[5503landis]

You probably already know this, but if you have the banner, just leverage the "alt" tag to maximize its use.

[piatkow]

As long as you still have an h1 tag at the top of the text. If you are using images to replace the h1 then you might have a problem.

[lammert]

The physical location of the images on the screen is not necessarily the same location in the HTML source. It is possible to put your text content first in a <div> block which has a large margin at the top. Further down in your HTML source you specify the images in a second div which you move to the top of the page with absolute CSS positioning coordinates.

With this approach the text is at the top which some people think is the best place from an SEO perspective. Furthermore the text pops up directly and the images are loaded later on which gives the users something to read while the images are loading. This can reduce the number of people hitting the back-button if your site doesn't load fast enough in their opinion.

A second posibility is to load the images as background images. You can do that by specifying them in the CSS code for the page. In that case the images won't delay loading of the page and the HTML page itself only contains very clean text which is good for SEO. Background images are automatically loaded after the main HTML codes have been parsed which is also good for the user experience.

[Mandala72]

Thanks for all the advice

Yes i use the 'alt' tags and have used the h1 tags too.

Lambert that sounds like good advice, however i use a WYSIWYG web creator (sitespinner) so editing the htmlis a little more tricky, but i'll bear it in mind