HTML Text and Photoshop Text

Composer? what is that..

I would much prefer using Adobe Photoshp for text titles. Their effects are nice & customizable & with CS2, you can do more with that.

"Raoul" wrote in message

Hey Folks:

I thought it best to do title text in photoshop and bring into my webpage for a better quality look. But, using Composer, the HTML looks pretty darn OK.

Thoughts?

Html text (using header tags like h1, h2, etc.) is much better for the search engines, plus it’s resizable and therefore more accessible. Not to mention more easily updateable.

Flo

Especially when it comes to search engines they rely on the meta tags if not the actual text words to properly rank them into their engines. Making the words into pictures won’t help the search engine at all when it comes crawling into your website nor that it will help you when it comes to page ranking.

On 11/22/05 10:08 AM, Flo Nelson commented:

"Raoul" wrote in message

Hey Folks:

I thought it best to do title text in photoshop and bring into my webpage for a better quality look. But, using Composer, the HTML looks pretty darn OK.

Thoughts?

Html text (using header tags like h1, h2, etc.) is much better for the search engines, plus it’s resizable and therefore more accessible. Not to mention more easily updateable.

I understand that fewer engines are using meta tags and comments, but what of image attributes like alt, title, longdesc (not applicable in this case)?

Also, while I understand that repetitive words/phrases help in rankings, you may choose to balance that with design; this depends on the site, its purpose and so on.

Still, if he’s just after a plain text title with no special effects or illustrative aspects, there’s no reason at all to make the text an image. Just name a cross-platform selection of common fonts in your styles.

inez

In article ,
"kitakits.com" wrote:

Especially when it comes to search engines they rely on the meta tags if not the actual text words to properly rank them into their engines.

That was true once. It is not true any more.

Right now, not one of the major search engines even looks at meta tags; the meta tags are completely ignored.

Meta tags were a great idea, but they are no longer useful thanks to the flagrant abuse of unethical Webmasters. Many Webmasters began taking lists of the most popular search terms, like "britney spears" and "recipie" and "Coca-Cola," and putting them into their Meta tags even when the sites had nothing to do with any of those things in order to boost search engine results. The practice became so common that meta tags became worthless.

Google and Yahoo stopped looking at meta tags years ago. The other major search engines all followed suit very quickly thereafter. As of 2002, only Inktomi still looked at meta tags; now, nobody does any more. Today, meta tags bloat the size of your HTML files but add nothing.

—
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

"I did mention Meta Tags and if NOT the actual words…" I find google actually crawls all over the pages of your website and keeps copies of it on their server making searching much faster. Also that when you do attach an image onto a website via HTML the ALT is still in words discription.. making it searchable to the current search engines we have today.

I even noticed that some website cheat by placing keywords on the bottom of their page… "example:keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword keyword"

Search engines I heard also programmed in such a way to minus the rank of a cheating website based on what ever contents they have.. giving its user relavent websites based on their search…

tacit wrote:

In article ,
"kitakits.com" wrote:

Especially when it comes to search engines they rely on the meta tags if not the actual text words to properly rank them into their engines.

That was true once. It is not true any more.

Right now, not one of the major search engines even looks at meta tags; the meta tags are completely ignored.

Meta tags were a great idea, but they are no longer useful thanks to the flagrant abuse of unethical Webmasters. Many Webmasters began taking lists of the most popular search terms, like "britney spears" and "recipie" and "Coca-Cola," and putting them into their Meta tags even when the sites had nothing to do with any of those things in order to boost search engine results. The practice became so common that meta tags became worthless.

Google and Yahoo stopped looking at meta tags years ago. The other major search engines all followed suit very quickly thereafter. As of 2002, only Inktomi still looked at meta tags; now, nobody does any more. Today, meta tags bloat the size of your HTML files but add nothing.

If search engines no longer rely on meta tags, what do they look at?

For a photography site dominated by galleries of images but with very little text, how can the search engines be steered to (but not cheated into) the site and images? Will adding titles and captions to the images help?

In article , wrote:

If search engines no longer rely on meta tags, what do they look at?

They look at the words actually contained in the (visible) body of the HTML.

Google relies heavily on "page rank" to determine search engine results. Page rank is a measure of how many people link to you. The idea is that the more people who have Web sites that link to you, the more valuable and pertinent people find your Web page, so the higher it appears in a Google search. The best way to have a very high search engine result is to have a large number of Web sites that link to you.

—
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

"tacit" wrote in message

In article , wrote:

If search engines no longer rely on meta tags, what do they look at?

They look at the words actually contained in the (visible) body of the HTML.

Google relies heavily on "page rank" to determine search engine results. Page rank is a measure of how many people link to you. The idea is that the more people who have Web sites that link to you, the more valuable and pertinent people find your Web page, so the higher it appears in a Google search. The best way to have a very high search engine result is to have a large number of Web sites that link to you.

—

Search engine ranking is actually based on complex algorithms that take a lot of different factors into account – metatags, page titles, headings, the text of the page, alt tags for images, number of hits you get, how many sites are linked to you (and what their rankings are). There are also checks for methods that try to spam the search engines – and the penalties are large for doing so.

For a photography site, I’d suggest a good description of the site and what is available on the home page — and titles/captions certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Flo

On 11/23/05 10:34 AM, Flo Nelson commented:

For a photography site, I’d suggest a good description of the site and what is available on the home page — and titles/captions certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Categorizing your galleries with a descriptive page for each category may help too.

(how to ask this question) Do the search engines pay attention to their image search results?

inez

"iehsmith" wrote in message

On 11/23/05 10:34 AM, Flo Nelson commented:

For a photography site, I’d suggest a good description of the site and what
is available on the home page — and titles/captions certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Categorizing your galleries with a descriptive page for each category may help too.

(how to ask this question) Do the search engines pay attention to their image search results?

If they can return results for something, then they’ve indexed it – I know alt text counts, not sure about image names. How things are weighted changes a lot and they keep it a secret.

Flo

Good suggestions and I understand most of the terms. But what are "alt tags for images" and "alt text" (from your other post)? You can tell that I’m a web design newbie.

It seems like that the search engines’ algorithms are text based. That’s why I find Google’s Image search very crude. One day, someone will make searching for images work better.

Flo Nelson wrote:

"tacit" wrote in message

In article , wrote:

If search engines no longer rely on meta tags, what do they look at?

They look at the words actually contained in the (visible) body of the HTML.

Google relies heavily on "page rank" to determine search engine results. Page rank is a measure of how many people link to you. The idea is that the more people who have Web sites that link to you, the more valuable and pertinent people find your Web page, so the higher it appears in a Google search. The best way to have a very high search engine result is to have a large number of Web sites that link to you.

—

Search engine ranking is actually based on complex algorithms that take a lot of different factors into account – metatags, page titles, headings, the text of the page, alt tags for images, number of hits you get, how many sites are linked to you (and what their rankings are). There are also checks for methods that try to spam the search engines – and the penalties are large for doing so.

For a photography site, I’d suggest a good description of the site and what is available on the home page — and titles/captions certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Flo

In article <wS0hf.3923$>,
"Flo Nelson" wrote:

Search engine ranking is actually based on complex algorithms that take a lot of different factors into account – metatags, page titles, headings, the text of the page, alt tags for images, number of hits you get, how many sites are linked to you (and what their rankings are). There are also checks for methods that try to spam the search engines – and the penalties are large for doing so.

That is true of everything except metatags. Major search engines do not consider metatags *at all*. They are not examined by the search engine and are not a factor in the result.

For Google, page rank (which is more than just a number of pages linking to a site; it’s a weighted score, which takes into account the page rank of the pages linking to a site as well) appears to be the single most important factor to where a page is returned in the list of hits. Other factors include the title tag (a keyword appearing in a page’s title has more weight than the same keyword appearing in the page’s body, all other things being equal), and many other factors, including image ALT text and so on.

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that the single best way to have a page returned very high in search results is to have a large number of pages linking to it. My own Web site, for example, has quite a high PageRank (and correspondingly high appearance in relevant Google searches), in part because a very large number of people link to it.

—
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

In article , wrote:

Good suggestions and I understand most of the terms. But what are "alt tags for images" and "alt text" (from your other post)? You can tell that I’m a web design newbie.

An "alt tag" is a name you give an image. It appears on the Web page while the image is loading, and in some browsers it appears as a little yellow popup when the user puts his mouse pointer over the image.

It looks like this (note: I am using "[" instead of "<" to avoid confusing any newsreaders that might try to interpret HTML):

[img src="http://www.someservername/someimage.jpg" alt="Gramma at the Beach"]

In this example, the browser will display the words "Gramma at the Beach" in the placeholder while the image loads; "Gramma at the Beach" is the alt tag for the image.

—
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

On 11/24/05 7:53 AM, commented:

Good suggestions and I understand most of the terms. But what are "alt tags for images" and "alt text" (from your other post)?

I had misspoke (not uncommon). It’s not actually a tag, but an attribute of the IMG tag.

The ALT attribute is meant to be a replacement for an image if the image doesn’t load in the browser. Example: alt="a dulling leaf that is yellowing and curling at the edges." (It’s best when you can think of the alt text as inline text so that it sort of flows with the rest of the text content instead of interfere with it or make for confusion.)

The TITLE attribute is just that, a descriptive title of what occupies that area: title="Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf"

Note: ALT text doesn’t "pop up" in amny newer browsers, but TITLE text will.

The LONGDESC attribute would contain an URL to a text page that contains a detailed, long description of the photo like: longdesc="sickleaf_desc.html" (or sickleaf_disc.txt). That page might read like:
——-
Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf

This is a photo of a Philodendron leaf that illustrates the dulling of its color and gloss and the yellowing and curling at the edges of the leaf that are the first indicators of a lack of essential nutrients and moisture in the soil.
——-

The IMG TAG would look like this:
<img src="sickphilleaf.jpg" alt="a dulling leaf that is yellowing and curling at the edges" title="Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf" longdesc="sickleaf_desc.html" width="120" height="144"

I really need to sort through my bookmarks. The above is as I remember it for somewhere, sometime ago. I’m sure someone will speak up if it’s outdatd info. You don’t do the above with spacer images, an empty alt attribute is sufficient. If I can find my old resource I’ll post it to this thread.

inez

Thank you (and Tacit) for the explanation. I now understand what is img’s alt attribute.

When an image is displayed with a caption (outside the image), is the caption created by the Title attribute?

iehsmith wrote:

On 11/24/05 7:53 AM, commented:

Good suggestions and I understand most of the terms. But what are "alt tags for images" and "alt text" (from your other post)?

I had misspoke (not uncommon). It’s not actually a tag, but an attribute of the IMG tag.

The ALT attribute is meant to be a replacement for an image if the image doesn’t load in the browser. Example: alt="a dulling leaf that is yellowing and curling at the edges." (It’s best when you can think of the alt text as inline text so that it sort of flows with the rest of the text content instead of interfere with it or make for confusion.)

The TITLE attribute is just that, a descriptive title of what occupies that area: title="Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf"
Note: ALT text doesn’t "pop up" in amny newer browsers, but TITLE text will.

The LONGDESC attribute would contain an URL to a text page that contains a detailed, long description of the photo like: longdesc="sickleaf_desc.html" (or sickleaf_disc.txt). That page might read like:
——-
Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf

This is a photo of a Philodendron leaf that illustrates the dulling of its color and gloss and the yellowing and curling at the edges of the leaf that are the first indicators of a lack of essential nutrients and moisture in the soil.
——-

The IMG TAG would look like this:
<img src="sickphilleaf.jpg" alt="a dulling leaf that is yellowing and curling at the edges" title="Photo that illustrates an unhealthy leaf" longdesc="sickleaf_desc.html" width="120" height="144"
I really need to sort through my bookmarks. The above is as I remember it for somewhere, sometime ago. I’m sure someone will speak up if it’s outdatd info. You don’t do the above with spacer images, an empty alt attribute is sufficient. If I can find my old resource I’ll post it to this thread.
inez

In article , wrote:

When an image is displayed with a caption (outside the image), is the caption created by the Title attribute?

No. It’s created when the Webmaster just types the text of the caption.

—
Art, photography, shareware, polyamory, literature, kink: all at http://www.xeromag.com/franklin.html

On 11/28/05 9:24 AM, tacit commented:

In article , wrote:

When an image is displayed with a caption (outside the image), is the caption created by the Title attribute?

No. It’s created when the Webmaster just types the text of the caption.

The only caption tag I know of was used in tables, though I could easily be wrong.

The title attribute in the img tag will popup when you mouse over the image.

inez

iehsmith wrote:

On 11/28/05 9:24 AM, tacit commented:

In article , wrote:

When an image is displayed with a caption (outside the image), is the caption created by the Title attribute?

No. It’s created when the Webmaster just types the text of the caption.

The only caption tag I know of was used in tables, though I could easily be wrong.

The title attribute in the img tag will popup when you mouse over the image.
inez

Thanks all, I think we have beaten this one to death.