Back in March I introduced you to an old RustyBrick developer who devised SEO Friendly Graphic Buttons. In that blog entry I linked to an article he wrote while with us named Graphical, SEO Friendly Buttons. Basically, it is a how to article on how to dynamically create graphical text with a header tag.
We now have a thread at our forums named H1 in a graphic where a member asks questions about if it is allowed and is it beneficial?
First, 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.
But where does it make sense? Matt, md_doc, an other guy who works at RustyBrick, discusses some of the issues with deploying this technology (oh, SEOJaimie is the one who wrote the article and he is in the thread discussion);
Just be careful about speed. I know the stuff that SEOJaimie wrote does cache the images but none the less if 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.
Matt goes on to suggest using CSS to rendered your Hx tags in the format you want. Basically, if you can get away with out using graphics on a site, especially dynamically generated ones, you can increase load time and decrease server resource requirements.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums.
