The Difference Between Text Links And Image Links

One of the most important aspects in web development is visual
appeal. Your site’s visual appeal is the first impression that a
visitor makes about your site, but visual appeal alone will not keep
your visitors in your site. The key to success is useful relevant
content. With the building of appeal, many Webmasters are convinced
that the use of image links outweigh the use of text links, but sadly
enough they are mostly dead wrong.

Google places a great emphases in textual content, hence the
importance of keyword relevant content on your sites pages. When your
site has an incoming link to it via an image, the only text seen by the
search engine robots is the ‘alt’ tag. This ‘alt’ tag can contain
relevant keywords, but the weight that it receives from Google is far
less than the weight that a textual link would receive. Here is why.

An inbound text link using the ‘title’ tag ties relevancy with the
textual phrase in the anchor text, and because the anchor text is
associated with the relevant keywords that would be used to find it at
the search engine query level, Google’s algorithm gives more weight to
these textual links.

The strategy in any aggressive SEO campaign is building site
visibility on the SERPs, and to date the most effective way to increase
both the placement of your site in the SERPs, and your site’s PR, is
thru the use of relevant one way link building.

Google’s algorithm was developed to actually examine all of your
site’s textual content and code and award it a value based on the
relevancy of its content. Additionally, Google PR is given by the rank
and value of your incoming text links. This means that as the number of
relevant incoming links to your site increases, so does your site’s PR.

Another point to make clear is that although having a large number
of relevant inbound links is good, having a smaller number of incoming
links from sites with high PR is better! Again, by looking at the way
that Google awards PR, we see that in essence when your site receives
an incoming link, that the site is casting a vote for your site’s
relevance. Google weighs the PR of the site voting for you and uses
that to determine your site’s value. Not all links are considered
important. This is why relevancy is a key factor in link building
campaigns.