CSS conversion from SEO point of view?

Hi guys/gals,
I’m working on converting a site from tables to CSS and the following question comes to mind;
The company currently uses an SEO company who used the alt tag of images quite extensively, for example

now in my task of converting these images to per say background image I will need to drop the whole alt tags.

question is does this really affect SEO? could I be damaging the site rank by converting the template to CSS?
thanks for any input

Well, one the one hand yes alt tags are indexed by search engines, so you are essentially removing that text from the page. On the other hand, table-based layouts are generally less SEO-friendly, so that is working in your favor. I also find that any time you make major changes to a site that piques the interest of search engines, so you’ll get a bump from that.

Do your best to make the new design as SEO-friendly as possible and you’ll be fine. Remember to target specific pages to certain keywords (generic text like you posted doesn’t buy you much). I find that search engines are too smart to be fooled by "tricks" nowadays anyway, so keep it real and focus on the content.

Quote from: sinbad at Dec 22, 2008, 10:00 PM

The company currently uses an SEO company who used the alt tag of images quite extensively, for example

 img src="something.png" alt="San Fransisco web design company"

now in my task of converting these images to per say background image I will need to drop the whole alt tags.

question is does this really affect SEO? could I be damaging the site rank by converting the template to CSS?
thanks for any input

’alt’ attribute not just important to SEO but accessibility too, therefor a descriptive alt text is very much favored. Speaking of SEO, both Yahoo and Google reward site that use semantic markup. Google ’semantic web’ to find out more. CSS layout by it self won’t help SEO much if one codes the layout with old table layout habit.

Thumb of rule using background image and inline image:
a) anything that is decorative, use background image.
b) anything that conveys a message and serves a purpose for the content, use inline image.

Should a company logo be a background image or inline? I favor former and use a image replacement technique.

Quote from: chinesedream at Dec 23, 2008, 12:58 AM

Thumb of rule using background image and inline image:
a) anything that is decorative, use background image.
b) anything that conveys a message and serves a purpose for the content, use inline image.

That guideline seems exactly right to me.

Quote from: chinesedream at Dec 23, 2008, 12:58 AM

Should a company logo be a background image or inline? I favor former and use a image replacement technique.

I often do the same thing, and you can use CSS to improve your SEO is this situation without sacrificing semantics. Your logo div can have a background image with the logo in the stylesheet and an h1 tag inside it with the company name. Just set div#logo h1 to be positioned way to the left of the visible page and you’ll have an image with a tag valued more than alt in your code, and if the site is viewed without images (e.g., in your print layout) you see the h1 text.

There are many variations of this technique (and plenty of others), but the key is not looking for "tricks" but rather using CSS and XHTML to make your code semantic and visually beautiful.