SEO friendly graphics

The Search Engine Roundtable asks ‘Are SEO Friendly Graphics Worth It?‘ I’m getting the answer on my blog for my own information as well as other developers who use similar techniques for SEO – search engine optimization.

SEO friendly buttons or graphics are basically graphical text with a header tag behind it that is not seen by users, usually an H1 header tag. A reader on the Search Engine Roundtable Forums asked if such an H1 header tag was allowed and beneficial?

…I see no reason why it would not be allowed. If you have a large content site with a sophisticated CMS sitting behind it and if you really want high end graphic headers, you would be crazy to have a graphic artist create a unique header for each page. This allows you to automate that with some code.

However, it’s noted “[I]f you are still stuck in the world of tables then your users will see a second or two lag time as that image is loaded and the page is rendered.” CSS is recommended to rendered your Hx tags.