Replace Header Text With Image
-
I have a static website that I would like to retheme. I have the mockup, and its spliced. The website holds nice rankings right now, and I want to keep them in place. The one thing that will change with this new design is the header will no longer be text, but instead an image. Is there a way to ensure googlebot still sees the H1 tag header exactly how it is now but use an image for the header instead?
I dont want any blackhat tricks that will get me banned. Just wondering if there is a simple way to have googlebot see the header as text (not ALT img txt) so the site does not appear to have changed at all. (It hasnt, I only am changing the graphics and colors of background, and header image for better branding.
-
To achieve a balance between visual aesthetics and search engine interoperability, you could use a Javascript font renderer like cufon: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ - which will give you nice anti-aliasing.
Look at Google Fonts too - http://www.google.com/webfonts#ChoosePlace:select
I would redesign & work towards getting a H1 on there rather than working backwards
-
Egol is correct.
your redesign has a cost, the desision is yours, what is more important, the HI or the design, only you know that.
-
You just need to make sure that the search engines will see your site exactly as visitors would see it. Don't try and hide anything. And I agree, try and keep the H1 tag.
And to answer your original question, the search engines have come a long way in terms of sophistication, but they still do not do so well with interpreting graphics, cookies, or javascript. Just good 'ole text.
-
I can leave the H1 tag in, I just dont know where to put it. Its my header, and the website now is VERY ugly. Maybe I will just put the H1 in there above the image, and then use a negative margin. Is that allowed?
-
You are going to use different html mark-up for the image and the h1.
They are not equivalent.
If you use the image you can add alt text but that is not going to be the same as H1 - less effective in my opinion.
If you can't get H1 into your site any other way then loss of the H1 will be part of the cost of your redesign.
If this was my site I would not give up H1 for an artsy image.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content in Accordion doesn't rank as well as Content in Text box?
Does content rank better in a full view text layout, rather than in a clickable accordion? I read somewhere because users need to click into an accordion it may not rank as well, as it may be considered hidden on the page - is this true? accordion example: see features: https://www.workday.com/en-us/applications/student.html
Technical SEO | | DigitalCRO1 -
All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue?
Hi, All images are noindex will opening this at once be an issue? Not sure how a few months ago all my images were set as noindex which i realized last week. We have 20K images which were indexed fine but now when i check Site:sitename it shows 10 or 12 and the inspect element via Chrome i see the noindex is set for all images. We have been renaming the images and adding ALT tags for most of them and would it be an issue if we change the noindex in one shot or should we do them few at a time? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Best way to present a single image from a gallery?
Hi. I want to make a page for each image on my clients gallery, so that each image page will be indexed and rank. (It's a tattoo portal and theres a lot of traffic on specific tattoos) But as the setup is for now, the only way it will be different from the other image pages, is the H1 title. Can you guys give some examples on "spot on" galleries SEO-wise, i could draw some ideas from?
Technical SEO | | MichaelRoscoe0 -
Rel="author" showing old image
I'm using http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets to test my rel="author" tag which was successful, but I noticed I wanted to change my image in Google+ as it is not what I want. I changed my image in Google+, it's been over 14 hours now and still not showing the new picture using the RichSnippets tool. I know Google can take a couple weeks at least to show changes in search results, but this RichSnippet tool I thought was immeidate. Am I missing something here or am I just impatient? I want my new photo to show.
Technical SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
Block url with dynamic text in
I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?
Technical SEO | | Beermonster0 -
Replacing H1's with images
We host a few Japanese sites and Japanese fonts tend to look a bit scruffy the larger they are. I was wondering if image replacement for H1 is risky or not? eg in short... spiders see: Some header text optimized for seo then in the css h1 {
Technical SEO | | -Al-
text-indent: -9999px;
} h1.header_1{ background:url(/images/bg_h1.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; } We are considering this technique, I thought I should get some advise before potentially jeopardising anything, especially as we are dealing with one of the most important on page elements. In my opinion any attempt to hide text could be seen as keyword stuffing, is it a case that in moderation it is acceptable? Cheers0 -
Image search and CDNs
Hi, Our site has a very high domain strength. Although our site ranks well for general search phrases, we rank poorly for image search (even though our site has very high quality images). Our images are hosted on a separate CDN with a different domain. Although there are a number of benefits to doing this, since they are on a different domain, are we not able to capitalize on our my site's domain strength? Is there any way to associate our CDN to our main site via Google webmaster tools? Has anyone researched the search ranking impacts due to storing your images on a CDN, given that your domain strength is very high? Curious on people's thoughts?
Technical SEO | | NicB10