Making the right use of header images in blogs

Most often sites are designed with a graphic header, especially blogs which come with all sorts of funky header images. It is often an image of the company logo occupying the full-page width or a nice looking picture that covers the entire width and stands 100 or 200 pixels high. The reason why people do this is to give that unique look to your blog. There are guys who argue that it even gives your blog that individuality, that visitors can even recognize your blog from that header image. True, even I’ve used it in the old times (remember the green header?)

Well my recommendation is that, don’t do it!

The upper part of a page(above the fold) is a very valuable place. Be it advertisement or placing important content that will get user’s instant attention. You should insert your most important keywords in this area for best seo practice.

In case of a graphic image, that prime position is wasted since search engines can not make good use of knowing your content from the images(except their ALT tags). Sometimes you may come across completely absurd situations: the header contains text information, but to make its appearance more attractive, it is created in the form of an image. The text in it cannot be indexed by search engines and so it will not contribute toward the page rank. If you must present a logo, the best way is to use a hybrid approach – place the graphic logo at the top of each page and size it so that it does not occupy its entire width. Use a text header to make up the rest of the width.

This is particularly effective, if you had to put in a logo or a picture of your’s for that “branding” while wanted to save space for SEO. Try to use the space maximum for describing what your site is about or try a descriptive sitename.

You can use the CSS to make custom H1 tags for the header and this will make text appear like the image, so the same effect of header image can be achieved while you are using the best SEO metrics. But using a header image to cover up the entire header space with just the ALT tags is not at all a good idea, though it looks good, what lies beneath is actually what counts when

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