Menu As Image And Text Options

[jrg09]

Hello!

I have got a question. Please, help me, if you can.

I am creating a php website. I want to create the website menu with image, because of the design, but for SEO it is not the best. For SEO purposes, making the menu by list is better. (if I know it well).

A friend of mine make a motion for me: Create the menu with image, use it as background image. And use the list as menu, but move the element of the list left 160 pixels. In this case, the user can't see the text of list, only see the menu image as background. The Google sees that the menu is text. In this case the menu is nice and it is good for SEO.

Is this legitimate for Google? Is this not a trickery?

Thank you in anticipation!

jrg09

[Randy]

Welcome jrg ! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/hi.gif)

It can be seen as trickery, is one of the easiest things to spot and is frankly completely unnecessary.

Using images for links is completely fine. The search engines pick them up just fine and you can use the alt text attribute to tie your keywords to each of the image links.

[Jill]

As Randy said, image links are fine. You could also use search friendly image map links which are also fine.

[1dmf]

I have used a similar method to enable SEO friendly menus and also menus which work for accessibility with screen readers and alike.

Though I have wrapped the anchor text in a <span class="menulink"> tag and then applied a display:none to the class.

It's not trickery if used purely for user friendly design, so far i've not seen it be a problem with any of the SE's.

But that doesn't mean it won't cause a problem, i've just not experienced one.

[freshpromo]

Though I have wrapped the anchor text in a <span class="menulink"> tag and then applied a display:none to the class.

It's not trickery if used purely for user friendly design, so far i've not seen it be a problem with any of the SE's.

But that doesn't mean it won't cause a problem, i've just not experienced one.

I've also used the display:none attribute for more of a visitor-friendly experience with a few of my sites and haven't experienced any problems. Yes, it is essentially hiding text from users and showing it to SE's, but I have faith that Google and the like can detect when you use it for ethical design purposes.

As far as creating menus goes, there's a lot you can do with CSS formatting now to make navigation links have that "button"-type feel.

[Randy]

As far as creating menus goes, there's a lot you can do with CSS formatting now to make navigation links have that "button"-type feel.

Yes there is. And I've even got a little app I built several years ago for a designer friend that'll spit out the code for you, so a little self promo link may be useful to someone who wants to do it but doesn't necessarily want to code it from scratch. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/lol.gif)

Use the Dotless List choice once you get into it to get a more button-y effect. You can even throw some background images in there to complete the effect if you want.

[Traffic-Bug]

Use the Dotless List choice once you get into it to get a more button-y effect. You can even throw some background images in there to complete the effect if you want.

Doing the menu with pure CSS & Text is good. But search engines do not mind image-based menus as long as you put in the ALT text as has been explained in this thread. I know many sites use good menu systems that are purely text-based (no images). The example I can give at the moment is microsoft.com site itself. Text menus are faster to load and are easier to navigate.