Dan Thies Answers 3

I have a client who would like to design her home page so that it looks like a postcard. The little bit of text that will be on the home page will be in a handwriting font, which means, then, that the entire page will be a graphic. I know text on the home page is important for SE placement. Is there any way around this? Thanks, Diotima Booraem http://www.virtualhelp.net Diotima: Let me get the bad news out of the way first, then offer some suggestions. Unfortunately, there isn't any neat way to get around the fact that search engines look for text. People type in words when they search, so you need words on the page if you want them to find you. Even putting the text from the postcard into the image's ALT property isn't going to get you the same results as using good old fashioned text. You may hear about "tricks" you can use to hide text on the page, for example on a hidden layer behind the images, but this is a *very* bad idea. All of the major search engines consider hidden text to be "spam," and your client certainly doesn't need to take that risk. Not all of the advice you get on search engines is good for you. Another solution I would consider, but probably reject, is the use of "dynamic" fonts. Bitstream has developed a browser plug-in technology to allow for the use of dynamic fonts, but it has not been widely adopted. If you want to consider it, you can learn more at http://www.truedoc.com. I would just caution you that this does require the visitor to install the plug-in before they can see the fonts. More and more, web users are suspicious of plug-ins, since so many of them are just backdoors for pop-up advertising, etc. Exerting a little control over the typeface might be practical, though. You could use a text layer on top of the "postcard" image. If your client is willing to use "Comic Sans," that should work for 90-95% of Windows users. For the others, defaulting to "Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif" should at least make the page readable. I don't know what the comparable typeface is for Macintosh and Linux users, if any. You'd want to look for typefaces that are installed by default with the operating system. Finally, you could put the "postcard" graphic at the top of the page, and use the bottom of the page for the textual content. Remember that a big image on top of the page won't stop the search engines from reading any text at the bottom. Wherever text first appears on the page, it should be seen as the first paragraph, and ranked accordingly. Dan Thies is a well-known writer and teacher on search engine marketing. He offers consulting, training, and coaching for webmasters, business owners, SEO/SEM consultants, and other marketing professionals through his company, SEO Research Labs. His next online class will be a link building clinic beginning March 22