Can The Search Engines Find Your Website

Do you know whether the search engines, whose crawlers and spiders scour the web for text to index, can find your site?

Recently, I was consulting on the creation of a web site for a visual artist. The Web designer wanted the text to be rendered in a beautiful font but the only way to control that was by setting the text in a graphic, essentially turning it into a picture. That means all the text throughout the site would be perceived by the computer as an image, even if users see actual text.

What my client didn't know was that text rendered as a graphic is both unsearchable (by users who may want to search a page for a particular word or topic) and unindexable (by search engines that control where you come up in the rankings). And although the designer knew these things, his goal was to create a good-looking site. He was ready to sacrifice function (usability and findability) for form.

After much debate, we decided to err on the side of function and chose one of the Web-friendly fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana and Helvetica are a few).

So here's the tip: For optimum usability, make sure the majority of your text is rendered as html text, not as graphics. Graphics are fine for headlines, but don’t use them for entire blocks of text.

If you're not sure what all this means, the question to ask your designer is this: is there enough html text on my site (especially the homepage) to make it searchable and indexable?
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Ilise Benun, author of Self Promotion Online and Designing Websites for Every Audience, writes, consults and gives workshops about online and offline self promotion. Sign up for her Quick Online Marketing Tips.