This is turning into a website developers thread real fast... :-).
Use title and alt tags for the images, Google uses them, not sure about other search engines..
The other thing you could do is have flat formatted text copy of the text in a <div> section set to be hidden. All search engines to the best of my knowledge will spider hidden dhtml stuff.. Just don't have an on-event show for it, or maybe do as some obscure single-pixel padding image, just to keep yourself happy. (This is one reason why sometimes you google a page and it comes up with lots of meta text on google itself, but when you click on it there is just a few images and little text)
Another common ploy is to have the site dynamic based on the requesting agent... When it seems googlebot (and other spiders) come along it presents everything in flat, indexable text. This is something that some content management engines do. They also enable rampant links to other popular sites when google comes calling to try and trick pagerank (The google ranking smarts) into up-ranking the page. (Another reason for weird google vs reality issues)
The other thing you can do is put the text on a separate page in normal HTML that has multiple links to the actual page, and have a link from actual page to it. You put a meta-tag redirect on the page so it can be spidered, but if anyone lands on it from a search engine they get shunted to the real page quickly the average punter just ignores it as part of the page building on screen. This would also mean that anyone getting the page from google via a browser with images turned off they would get the text intact for at least a couple of seconds! :-).
Or a combination of all of the above... Back when I cared about my page rankings (ie: when I was selling stuff on the web) I had top 1-5 with about 20 key searches for my products. It was a constant struggle. Now I just rely on being unique and hoping my potential customers stumble on me...
Search engine ranking is an art form, not a science. Good luck. Cheers, Chris H Steve Holdoway wrote:
Thanks for all the input... problem with using images is that the search engines don't see it then. However, it's probably what I'll need to do. Cheers, Steve
