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I'm currently designing a site and have been wondering about some basic SEO. I understand that text is obviously better for SEs than images, but I wondered if a SE will give equal weight to an <img> tag with the "alt" attribute as it would to a <h1> tag.
For example:
<h1>The Best Site Ever</h1>
or
<h1><img src="bestsiteeverlogo.gif" alt="The Best Site Ever" /></h1>
The advantage of the second one, of course, is that I wouldn't then be restricted to such a limited number of fonts to use, etc.
Can anyone tell me if there would be much difference between the two as regards SEO?
Can anyone tell me if there would be much difference between the two as regards SEO?
IMHO it makes all the difference in the world.
It's just too easy to stuff keywords into IMG ALT tags. Ignore them for SEO - just put a useful description of the image in there (that's what they're for, after all).
<h1> content is much more important - it's (almost) always visible, so the search engines see what your visitors do.
You should read Google's webmaster guidelines [google.com] and follow them, at least until you've earned your SEO black hat :-)
