SEO and Images on your default page

[sinead]

Hi there,

A general query....does anyone know if having an image contained on your homepage negatively affect your SE ranking?

When we were working on our website design initially we deliberately opted for a text-heavy, image/graphic-low design as we read that Google prefers more text v less images. We want to put an image (screenshot) of our tutorial within the default page (again, avoiding pop-ups for SEO purposes) but we want to be sure this won't adversely affect our ranking.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Best regards,
Sinead

www.crossculturetraining.com

 

[louie]

one image it shouldn't affect search engines whatsoever.
Just make sure you add the alt tag to it or a title tag if it's a link.

Search engines tends to ignore the image itself if too many, but they do read the tags i mentioned above.

Put it this way, all they can see is html code, not the image itself.

Images tend to take very little html space (1-2 lines), but they increase loading time if not optimised properly or too big.
I consider 450px width to be enough. if you have a bigger one then use tumbnails linked to the main one.

Hope this help.

 

[mneylon]

If it's image + text you'll be fine.

 

[tomed]

If you are only going to put an image thre and nothing else.... yes it will affect your rankings. You need to keep as much content as possible.

 

[Gavin]

I know this is an old thread but I would like to give my 10 cents.

Images can play a big factor in SEO if it is done correctly as Google has an image bot to index sites into their image search but it can also help with their normal search.

If you can place an image on your page link to another page that is relevant. Use the ALT tags for the image making sure you dont stuff keywords, using a three phrase keyword should do the trick.

If done correctly this can work wonders for the page you have linked too. You 'll also notice traffic starting to come in from the image search engine as well, thats if you havent blocked images from being crawled.

At the moment I am actually testing how well images actually do work by making all the sidebar nav links images instead of text links......fingers crossed that Google doesnt drop me like a brick

 

[georgiecasey]

On another note, I've heard that Google is testing using OCR software on images on porn sites and indexing it. Dont know why theyre trying to find text on porn images, but thats the field they're testing it!

 

[Gavin]

Now thats interesting - I dont suppose you have any links with info on that? Would be useful to get some background on it.