Image link or Text link for SEO

[Mark]

Which will perform better? Why?

[Peter]

I think the text links are more preferred by people since the search engines can read them well although image links are just fine, as long as you put in ALT text.

[paul]

I think both are important, however Text links is more important to generate quality backlinks and top SERPs and image links are also important for branding and to run ad campaign.

[kev woodman]

I'm puzzled - as far as search engines go why would an image link look any different to a text link - all the spider sees is html and a href is a href is a href.

Is there some other factor affecting SEO and image links?

From a usability/accessibility point of view then a text link is probably better but as mentioned above this isn't a problem as long as you have a decent alt text attached.

[Administrator]

Text become keywords while images give only a direct link. We've removed most of the images from our website for same reason and those which could not remove have been modified and we've cleared text matter from those images and written text on those images through coding.

Our growing traffic from Search Engine is result of this changes. You can see the banner on top of this forum and you would see that the rotating words are text and its not a usual gif banner.

[kev woodman]

I take the point about keywords - and everyone should know by now that embedding text in a graphic is bad. But does anyone know if search engines accept key words found in alt text?

[Administrator]

Very few search engines read alt tags but none of the top 3 give improtance to alt tags while showing listing of a website in general search. Your images would be shown in google images and images search of other SE's only.

[paul]

IMO, its better to use ALT tags on all images that have a purpose.

[kev woodman]

Yep - if you placed an image link without alt text or a text alternative you could be guilty of breaching the disability discrimination act. I'm sure I've read that Google spiders alt text you know.

[Administrator]

To protect your images from getting listed in Image search of search engines you should not put alt tags. If you need to improve your traffic in anyways then adding alt and title tags is very good as the hits coming through google images bring good traffic to websites that have good number of images.