seo - images and h1

Question

I have a situation where I'd like to stick to using my logo instead of the actual text for my h1 tags. if I put in my keywords in the alt tag, instead of actually written, will I suffer in SEO. Is it better to have both text and an image? Thoughts?

<div id="hdr-top-logo">
 <h1>                   
  <a href="/">
   <img src="logo.jpg" alt="keywords and title" />
  </a>
 </h1>
</div>

Answer 1

SEO is speculative at best.

Generally the accepted convention is to use where appropriate and you won't suffer. For example, your code I would write something like this:

<div id="hdr-top-logo">
 <h1>                   
  <a href="/" title="Blahblah.com logo">
   <img src="logo.jpg" alt="Blahblah logo" />
  </a>
 </h1>
</div>

The benefits of actually having the text instead of the logo won't be much, if anything.

Note: alt + title should be descriptive, so don't just stuff a bunch of keywords in there, otherwise you will suffer SEO wise.

Answer 2

If you have access to the CSS, the ideal approach is to replace your h1 tag with an image via css.

So you have this html:

 <h1 id="hdr-top-logo">                   
  <a href="/">
  </a>
 </h1>

and this css:

#hdr-top-logo { 
width: width of logo.png here; 
height: height of logo.png here; 
background: url(logo.png); 
text-indent: 100%; 
white-space: nowrap; 
overflow: hidden;
}

When used appropriately, this is completely search-engine friendly.

NB there are quite a few different techniques for image replacement, this is the Scott Kellum method as seen here http://css-tricks.com/examples/ImageReplacement/

You might want to have a look and experiment to see which technique suits your situation best, there are different drawbacks to using different methods.