Text vs. Graphics
Improving a website includes the delicate balance between driving traffic, and enhancing the customer experience. Determining the use of text versus graphics requires the application of this balance.

Search engines cannot read the images very well. Their robots do not know, from the image alone, if a picture includes the name of your product or a picture of your grandmother. To them, it’s only an image. While trying to determine what your site is about, they have a hard time translating the content that is included inside these images, making it imperative that a website include a sufficient amount of actual text. Search engines have to trouble reading text, but images don’t help them out at all.

On the flip side, visitors to your site are visual creatures, who would much rather flip through pictures than reading a page of text, so designers often like to grab their attention with captivating graphics and illustrations.

Gravitate Online must balance these two factors to give search engines enough text, while giving the visual appeal of illustrations. Our designers work with our SEO experts to achieve the best of both worlds.

Image Alt Tags
Have you ever hovered over an image with your mouse, and then seen a small tan box appear with text describing the image? The you’ve seen an Alt Tag. These tags improve the user experience, making it easier for people to see what’s in a picture, and displaying this text when images are not loading. Google likes when webmaster apply these types of best practices.

Although Google can’t read an actual image, we can help them out with the addition of Alt Tags in the HTML code. Each code snippet includes text that describes to the search engine what is included in the graphic. When done correctly, this is a great way to help search engines identify the most important content on your page. Done incorrectly and Google will penalize your site.

Gravitate Online will optimize each image with these descriptive tags that help provide a good user experience, and help you show up higher is search results.