Back in the early days of Internet when the entire process was nothing but a series of tubes and nerd forums, websites were designed with basic, terrible technology. But over time the technology advanced, leading to websites filled with flash and fancy graphics and other nifty programming contraptions that made them all pretty and wonderful and sugar and spice.
Then Google came.
That is something that most people forget. While websites with enjoyable graphics once made a boring web experience more interesting, now they represent a serious problem: Without words, search engines have no idea that your website has any content, and if it doesn’t see any content, it assumes your website is useless.
Moving From Pictures to Words
If your website is nothing but images, Google will be unable to index it correctly. This is especially true if you use images as your text. For example:
Many websites use graphics in place of content. But graphics cannot be read by modern search engine technology. Search engines crawl your image rich and content free website and draw a blank, knowing only that you have some alt tags and a title. That is not enough to improve your search engine rank.
You need to make sure that your website has words. Lots of words. Words that can be read by any search engine. Ideally you get interesting and unique content written and avoid all of the flashy graphics. Perhaps hire an amazing copywriting company like, say, Great Leap Studios to complete all of your content for you. Hint Hint. Nudge Nudge.
If you insist on using images, I like the method occasionally used by Today I Found Out. It’s a website that hasn’t hired us [yet] that shares interesting facts for trivia fans. Often they use something they call an “infographic.” An example can be seen here. They have the text in the image, but they have the actual text listed below to help with SEO.
Use Text
Search engines are not people. They’re computers with algorithms that look for words to help them understand a website’s purpose and value. So we have to help them out a bit and make sure the right information is included on your pages to get everything indexed. Otherwise you’ll be singing the SEO blues.
