More on why i'm asking about Google rankings

[transcendancing]

(and if anyone can find that bookmark on how the search rankings work, I'll love them forever

Comments

[chaosmanor]

I must admit I didn't get all the way through this post, not being geeky. I have a friend who is a specialist at search engines (but possibly not google). Her lj is msilverstar and she loves me, so if you contact her (msilverstar(at)livejournal(dot)com)and say I sent you, she may be able to help you out a bit.

msilverstar was the person who gave me the code for my livejournal, back in the days when ljs weren't easily acquired.

[babalon_93]

okay, now I think I understand what you trying to achieve and where you sense the problem will be. The H1 think is not really relevant, but you are worried that because your main headings are not in text but as images search engines won't find them, yes? adding an 'alt' tag in your image tag could solve this (and you are suposed to do that anyway for disability access) or go back to using text. You can also add a list of key words behind the scenes.

I saw a program on google ranking the other night, it is based both on relative content (i.e. does the sight have the words you have searched for) and partly on authority (i.e. how many other pages have linked to yours and the authority of the linking sites).

[shrydar]

babalon_93 has raised an good point about accessibility, particularly if all your headings are going to be images.

I know you're not with D.F.A., but they do have an excellent resource on these issues here:
http://www.agimo.gov.au/practice/mws/accessibility/

If no-one's addressing them, you've plenty of scope for a crusade if you bored at work ;)

[livelurker]

HTML markup originally started as marking up the content of the document, ie what is a header, what is a paragraph, a link, etc. It is designed to say what chunks of text are (a header, etc

[syneryder]

There's another option you could try - using CSS in conjunction with your H1 tag, you can hide the H1 tag. (I think "display: none;" is what you would have to put in the relevant CSS section). This way it will only display if someone has CSS turned off (eg browsing in text mode for accessibility reasons). You could then put your image underneath, and only the image would be displayed to most browsers. You should still get many of the SEO benefits that way... but it depends how Google is feeling from week to week. They might choose to ignore the whole H1 tag instead.

If you just have an image + alt tag inside an H1 tag, you don't seem to get as much of a boost as if you had plain text in there. That's just from my experience. I'm not an SEO guru, just had some luck with some of my rankings.