Background images -- tag them ?

[killerbeame]

Hi- thank you for reading this.

The new place where I am working has their own way of doing things so I have come across a few issues that are new to me.

- Some of their sites have the company logo as background images. Is it ok to Alt tag background images or would this look fishy to SE's?


- Also pages that end with .jsp. I have heard conflicting information on this-- is this equally as visible as the standard html pages?


Thank you for your help. It is much appreciated.

Bonnie :)

[Dubbya]

There is no purpose in adding alt text to a background image since a search engine, bot, spider or page viewer can't see it.

If the corporate logo must be a background image and you hope to use alt text, you'd be better off placing a small transparent .gif image with alt text in front of background image, inside a table cell, for example.

The size of the transparent image is pretty much irrelevant.

[Webnauts]

Originally Posted by killerbeame

- Some of their sites have the company logo as background images. Is it ok to Alt tag background images or would this look fishy to SE's?

My example is evidence based most proper way to add logos on your site:

[img]images/logo.png[/img]

Only the logo on your entry page, i.e index.html or index.jsp, should not be linked.

That is an accessibility, usability, web navigation and semantical issue.

So that is the best option for humans and search engines.

So never edit your logo as a background image.

Check our sites for a live example. :)

[brian.mark]

Since nobody has addressed the file extension portion yet, I'll answer that.

Unless your code comes back looking different than a standard (x)html document, there is no difference in ranking for using any technology or extension. You could program something in assembly and it'd work just fine. Program it in Pascal... it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the code that gets spit back to the bots.

Brian.

[Dubbya]

Only the logo on your entry page, i.e index.html or index.jsp, should not be linked.

That is an accessibility, usability, web navigation and semantical issue.

Good point!