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Navigation: Image Links Website Architecture |
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The power of Image LinksImages are a powerful way to attract the attention of website visitors. It has become a natural habit for people to click on an image, especially those who are not completely internet savvy. In fact, an active response is a natural response to any stimuli in nature: Image links are no exception! However, this poses an interesting challenge when considering how search engine spiders interpret image links. Since search engine spiders cannot "read" or in any way interpret the message that is being conveyed to visitors by an image, the only tool a website architect has to communicate the image contents is known as the alt text tag. The alternate text tag was initially developed in html to provide an image description for those people, or browsers, incapable of viewing images. The "alt text" was designed to display in place of the image. With all modern browsers, the alt text associated with any image is visible if a visitor hovers the mouse over the picture. In the search engine optimization world, the alt text tag was quickly targeted as a way to stuff keywords into the content of a page without changing a web page's appearance. Hence, the alt text tag was often abused by savvy SEO's stuffing dozens to hundreds of key words in the alt text tag in an attempt to leverage search engine ranking results. This posed a serious problem for the search engines, as well as the visually handicapped visitors relying on special software to interpret the page content. Consequently, the major search engines began filtering these tags out; in other words, ignoring them. Although the way the search engines handle any website code can change at any time, today the text in alt text tags are largely disqualified for ranking purposes. However, the alt text associated with an image link is currently still considered for search engine ranking purposes. The text contained in any image link alt text tag should be developed very carefully. The text should be pertinent to the image content and message ( especially for the handicapped ), AND be pertinent to the page one is linking into. One may even want to pay careful attention to the actual file name of the image itself, to ensure organic website content. Image Links with TextA more popular and perhaps wiser strategy is to incorporate both an image link and an accompanying text link. The only drawback to this method is that it effects the presentation of the page and image. Small asthetic changes can be made to minimize the impact of the text to serve many different purposes, including useability and correct website architecture for search engine optimization. Balancing asthetics with search engine targeting website architecture is a matter of preference and priorities which each website owner will have to determine on a case by case basis. Image Map Links Image MapsAn image map is a useful linking tool to combine graphics and links in an intuitive manner allowing website visitors to easily navigate on an existing page or to another page. One main image is used, and then an image map is made by defining areas through a coordinate system. The image map above consists of four links "embedded" in the primary image. Alt text should always be used to provide further information both for users and for search engine robots/spiders. Image maps, however, are bulky in code and should be used only to achieve very specific results on website pages.
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