Help...before I kill IT!!!

[grimmylina]

I have a problem....the IT person that thinks he knows hot to do SEO work is driving me crazy.

He thinks that by using more text on websites that Goggle will somehow magically put us in the number #1 spot.

I know that content has alot to do with improving our rankings and I have no problem doing that (I am the Web Designer)....but we have had problems in the past because he keeps trying to switch my page designs to all text and I personally think that will look like crap.

http://www.thechesterfieldhotel.com/


In this site he ants me to switch all the rollover images to text and I personally think that if we add more content it would be better. This was his reasoning:

titles, and name of the sections :
feauters, safari bar, reservations, etc , from IMAGES to TEXT ? so
they searchable from the search engines?

also the address is an image instead of text, is better text so they
associate address of the hotel in google maps.

search engine needs to understand the structure of the site, if the Titles are in TEXT, you will see on the search the name of the page and also the SUBTITLES as a part of the result, is very important , can you replace the IMAGE with the text, and make it look similar?

[WebJoel]

Moving "images" that are foreground elements (in the HTML) to "background-image" (which is CSS) and using TEXT to describe the link DOES provide a measure of Accessibility that is denied when using image-based buttons.

And, it reduces the footprint of the document; smaller is better for faster loading and it allows 'bots to penetrate deeper into a site's content, searching for indexables.

I checked your current pagerank, it is "4". Not too bad, really.

re: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.ph

On a 'designer' note, I have to say that this corner-image that follows the scrolling down the page is horrible. I only see this on spammer pages and javascript sites that promote it's existence. I find it tacky. Preferred (by me at least) might be the same image (which is 'presentation' really, it's absence subtracts nothing from the 'content') should be absolute (stays in one place and does not jerkily-jerk down the screen during scroll, which I find highly annoying, visually.)

I see at least 50 validational warnings, very little semantic use of elements, and the fact that this is TABLE-based layout for NON-tabular data tells me that you're both about 10-years behind current standards and best-methods but that's just my opinion. :)

[grimmylina]

Yeah.....some things I have to do. Like the little corner image.

I mean personally my opinion is that if a website for a hotel is going to look unattractive then that defeats the purpose of attracting visitors who want to see photos and a nice website.

[austany]

ah dealing with a SEO specialist is hard, most of them dont have concept of design. But then again, look at a site like craigslist.org no style but gets tons of hits, and it wouldnt be the same with style.

But what does it matter what the site looks like if your getting 10k hits a week and making ok money on advets?

EDIT: and look at my site, i was advised by a seo specialist to put things in places i did not agree with but.. his ideas worked and im doing alot better then i was

[grimmylina]

Yes, I have decided to meet him half way and re-do the site (he wanted me to replace some images with text but I'd rather re-do the site and have it look good with just text).