Everyone who works in the Search Engine Marketing world knows and appreciates how important good content is. When we talk about good content from an SEO perspective what we really mean is that there is a good amount of "Real" text on the site.

Other forms of content can help your internet marketing, however this is not in the same direct sense that text can. For example, interesting videos, pictures or animations can encourage people to link to or bookmark your page, which will help develop the marketing to some degree, but when we ask for content, we really mean good unique copy pertaining to the keywords that a client wants to rank well for.

Another important concern, that many clients can't initially understand is that if the text is in an image, then a search engine cannot read it.

You can tell this is the case when you look at any website that has text within an image. Take the Vertical Leap website for example. When you look at our home page, quite a few of the top areas of text are actually contained within images (highlighted in red):

You can see this when you look at the cached text page that records all the text that Google stores on its database. You can look at the cached text using the following method. Perform your search, in this case for "Search Engine Optimisation Company" and click on the "cached" hyperlink (circled in red):

From here you see an the site as Google saw it when the site was last crawled. However this isn't really what Google have saved about your site, as these images that are on the site have not been saved on their database, they are still on your server. To see the information that Google has saved about your site, you have to click on the "cached text" hyperlink (again circled in red):

From this you can tell that none of the text that appears within these images has been saved by Google. Now although it knows that this image exists, it only knows what is contained within it from what is specified as the "alt" tag. The alt tag is there so that people who are blind and use a screen reader can have a description of what the images contain "read" to them by the computer. However, they still can only take your word for that, the alt tag has very little or no SEO value, so Google will essentially ignore this.

As you can see the text that Google has indexed does not contain the text that is contained within those images, for the reasons described above.

Now imagine if the entire site was purely constructed from images, with all the text that is on the site also within these images and not written in HTML format. None of the text on the site, which is vital to get search engine rankings will be indexed and therefore none of it will have any chance to rank.

Essentially the site will be out in the wilderness, and no matter how good the content is, the site will be near impossible to get to rank for any search terms! Now, there are reasons why there should be text in images, the very fact we do so on our own website should be tribute to that fact. However, if you want to get traffic for that term, please ensure that the text is there in the format that the search engines can read, its for your own benefit we say this, not just to be awkward!