Everyone wants to appear first in a Google search. With Google latest release of Penguin they are trying hard to reward sites with GOOD content, while at the same time penalizing sites trying to “game” the system. People spend countless hours and vast sums of money optimizing their site. This is important to maximize your exposure, however, too many people fail to incorporate simple changes that can have a dramatic effect on their ranking.

However, the rules are explained by Google and explained in their Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Below is a paragraph from the guidelines.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the “ALT” attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Many sites use Flash or graphics to display text on their pages. It’s important you verify that your webmaster didn’t use “images” instead of “text”. Sometimes this is done because the client wants a specific font, however, there are better ways to handle this. Thus it’s important that you check the site yourself. Below are the simple steps to check.

1: Type in your site’s name in a google browser
2: Your site should be listed on the top. Move your mouse to the right of your domain and you will see two arrows.
3: Click on “cached”
4: Then click on “text-only version”
5: You will then see what Google sees

Below is the result of a site we just redid. Below is what each of the interior pages from the old site looked like to Google. So Google was unable to index the text from the site and thus it’s impossible for Google to “learn” how to rank this site. The new site we designed use important key words in the text, which were easily indexed by Google. Now the client has a good chance to rank well for important key words, whereas before it was impossible.

If this is too complicated you can send me your domain name and I will be happy to check for you no charge.