Mouse over and text effect

[behzad]

Below I have attached a button that is made of an icon, text and shapes.
When I group them all and assign a mouse over, the text no longer is selectable therefore it can not be read by google crawlers.

How can this be fixed.

[gwpriester]

Does the text appear in the image description in the HTML script?

If not you can name the image using the name tag feature. But if the text is grouped with the graphic then it shows as an Alt Text entry for the image script.

[Egg Bramhill]

When I group them all and assign a mouse over, the text no longer is selectable therefore it can not be read by google crawlers.

That's correct. When you group objects like shapes & text Xara exports them as either a jpg or png. So if you have your, let's call it a "luggage label icon" image, below some text content, then each image is exported as a separate image file. This can cause Xara to export a lot of individual images for every button and every mouse state. Never as text.

Not a big issue but it can create multiple calls to the server when serving up the webpage, which is not ideal.

For example if you create a navbar in Xara using the NavBar feature and say it has 10 buttons then that's 20 images the browser needs to download (MouseOff / MouseOver)

An alternative, as suggested by Gary is to create a single button shape, select it and give it the name "filename=button-off-background". This has the advantage of loading just one image from the server and using it multiple times.

Now to the text. As stated you wish to keep the text as text for Search Engine purposes. So you can overlay text content above your named graphic. This works fine and doesn't create multiple image files.

However it does have the disadvantage on mouse over of changing the cursor from a "finger-link-icon" to a "text-caret-icon" when over the text. I personally dislike this.

To circumnavigate this I prefer to use a further graphic (the one containing the url link) above both button & text. Again this graphic (or image) has a filename e.g. "filename=icon-overlay"

I attach an example, and whilst not being a simple to use as Xara's navbar reduces image size and server call requests to as low as possible.

Preview and "View image Information". It only has 3 image files and the text above the image remains as html readable text.

Hope this helped.

[behzad]

Thank you guys. That was helpful.

[Acorn]

Late to the discussion. I would create the graphic a one shape, superimpose the text, Soft-group and then add the Link.
The link pointer is then available over all the object and the text stays as text.

All can be use in roll-overs. The MouseOver or other layered shape needs to have a different filename.

Acorn

[behzad]

Guys, like Gary said, when I look at the source code, The text is there. So in reality google reads the code not what it sees on the screen, correct?

[Acorn]

Guys, like Gary said, when I look at the source code, The text is there. So in reality google reads the code not what it sees on the screen, correct?

Google bots are oblivious to layout; they read the code and weight it according to frquency, HTML style, visible or hidden. If it apprars in Alt text, it is still read.

It is pointless to second guess Google so bin excessive SEO and design web pages with good prose and styling.

Acorn