Member Avatar for dominique7

Hello,

I've read quite a bit about SEO and made my first experiences. But well... it really takes time to make a bunch of experiences!

I'm in the conflict whether to design a start page really nicely with antialiased picture texts, or with real text, which is more and more seen. At least I think having observed that more people use text instead of pictures, even for page titles while they often didn't in earlier days.

Now my question:
Does it really make a big difference - Serp-wise - if I put my page's title and maybe (if that goes together with the nice look and feel of that start page) one or two keyphrases in text-form, so preferably h1 to h3, or if on the other hand I go for the nice looking version with text in the form of images and put the text also in the "alt" tag?
I'd find it a pity for artists who really want a simple and nice looking starting page - on those the title catches the looks much more than on a usual landing page filled with content.

Cheers,
Dominique

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Short answer for : keep the page title and key phrases as real HTML headings when those words matter for search. Search engines read semantic headings and anchor text as stronger signals than text rendered only inside images; alt text helps accessibility and image discovery, but it is not a direct substitute for an H1/H2 that communicates page structure. For designers who want a very specific look, use web fonts or inline SVG text so the wording stays in the DOM while appearing antialiased, instead of replacing the heading with a bitmap. (developers.google.com)

A practical, low-risk approach: deliver a proper <title> and an H1 with the real words, then style that H1 with a web font. Web fonts via @font-face (WOFF/WOFF2) plus font-display and font preloading preserve design and avoid JS hacks. The old JS canvas technique Cufon is discontinued and not recommended today; standard web-font loading is the modern solution. Example pattern:

<link rel="preload" href="/fonts/MyBrand.woff2" as="font" type="font/woff2" crossorigin>

<style>
@font-face{
  font-family: "MyBrand";
  src: url("/fonts/MyBrand.woff2") format("woff2");
  font-display: swap;
}
h1{ font-family: "MyBrand", system-ui, sans-serif; font-size:48px; }
</style>

<title>Artist Name — Gallery</title>
<h1>Artist Name — Gallery</h1>
<p>One-line descriptive tagline for users and search engines.</p>

Use real text first, style second. (developer.mozilla.org)

A few operational notes tied to and : if JavaScript is doing the replacement, provide a non-JS fallback or server-side rendering so crawlers see the same core text; Google can render JS but that rendering can be delayed, so reliance on client-only injection is risky. Also, ranking depends on helpful content and context, not just one pretty landing page — a few quality pages (blog posts, descriptive gallery pages) give the site topical signals and internal linking that help visibility. Test with Search Console (URL Inspection) and Lighthouse to confirm what bots and users actually see. (developers.google.com)

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Member Avatar for Spain

Nowadays there's an alternative to images if you want antialiased text, while still being "text" for the SEs, i.e. Cufon.

With it you can design a beautiful landing page with any font you want (even if it isn't installed in the user's computer), while optimizing your SEO efforts.

Edited by Spain because: n/a
Member Avatar for dominique7

Thank you Pedro,

since your message I've tried Cufon and it was quite easy to use!

Also I'd really like to learn about how big the difference in the SERPs would be for a *graphical* start page with "alt" tags versus a *text* page.
Doesn't Google cope with alt tags and the page title? How much higher would a page with just a few words (as in a sleek artist's entrance page) in text rank?

It's quite hard to decide which way to go.
I think that I'll also have to get some statistics about how many users have Java script enabled, so would see the Cufon fonts.

Cheers for now,
Dominique

Member Avatar for infinique

Google likes content. If your website is less than 15 pages, then it's hard to get high ranking. If your site is really static on content, I suggest installing a blog on it's sub folder.

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