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Articles Index >> Marketing
Images or Text On a Website: Which Is Best?
by Michael Cheney
Using images on your website is a great way to draw people into your content.
There is no point in having a website that is full of text and doesn’t
have any graphical elements to it, as people will think it’s a web design
nightmare.
Images obviously look better, but often search engines can’t actually
read them. What I mean by this is that search engines, when they visit your
website, spider all the content on your pages. They are easily able to grab
and spider all the words on your pages. They can’t, however, grab and
spider the images as easily.
A search engine cannot differentiate between an image of a pig and an image
of a book. So if you have lots and lots of images on your website and you depend
heavily on these images to convey the content and message of your website, this
message will not be reflected in the search engines.
The other thing about images is that they take longer to download and appear
on the screen. This is quite simply due to their size. A piece of text is small
in file size so it travels through the Internet to the persons screen much quicker
than an image which is larger in size.
If you don’t have enough images though, you’ll have a boring website.
So you need to strike a perfect balance.
The other thing to consider is that if you have text navigation, your website
is far more likely to be spidered in its entirety by the search engines. Some
people have navigation that looks as if it’s written in text, but it’s
actually created using images.
The easy way to tell if something is text or if it is an image on a website
is to highlight it with your cursor. If you can highlight something letter by
letter, then it is definitely text. If you try to highlight it letter by letter
and it only highlights as a large block, this means it is actually an image.
If you use image format for your navigation, you run the risk of not having
a search engine friendly website.
One of the most important things to consider when developing your website,
creating your sales copy and copywriting for your website is that it’s
the words that actually make every sale. Although they say that a picture paints
a thousand words, it’s the words that make you the money.
You can have a website that is just full of pictures and images and it won’t
sell a single thing. You can then have a website that is only full of words
and it can sell lots and lots of products. So you need to focus your efforts
on getting excellent copy.
You really need to think about maybe hiring a professional copywriter, getting
some sales letter advice, looking at other peoples sales letters or maybe even
investing in some sales letter software. There are some great solutions out
there.
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