[HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image!

Originally Posted by Lasher

As an alternative to making welcome headers a graphical page which does somewhat increase page size, you can also use the excellent vbseo "relevant replacement" functionality to build a SEO header in with the welcome headers.

Here's an example of forum display and thread display:

Advanced MUD Concepts - Top Mud Sites Forum
Future MUD directions - Top Mud Sites Forum

The beauty of this approach to me is that my registered users aren't seeing the "about this page" headers - they already know all about the page. Guests that are less familiar with the site get the summary as part of welcome headers which means the SEs pick up that text first too.

Im not understanding your method. On both your links, your welcome headers are in text...which means google should cache them as text... ?

I would rather do it your way if it works, instead of the image way since im an image idiot aswell. ( I dont have any website editing programs installed )

Im going to do it the Text message way. Screw it.

Because if you make it an image, you have to consider everybody's browser. Believe it or not, alot of people still use 800 x 600 resolution.. Your image would take up a large portion of the screen for people viewing with that resolution... and if your a high resolution like 1300 x 1100 or whatever, your image will look small.

Mine aswell just go with text. Google wont take much emphasis on that text if it see's its included on every page. It will give it a default small value and thats it. The rest of your page is what Google will concentrate on.

Originally Posted by mikeinjersey

Im going to do it the Text message way. Screw it.

Because if you make it an image, you have to consider everybody's browser. Believe it or not, alot of people still use 800 x 600 resolution.. Your image would take up a large portion of the screen for people viewing with that resolution... and if your a high resolution like 1300 x 1100 or whatever, your image will look small.

Mine aswell just go with text. Google wont take much emphasis on that text if it see's its included on every page. It will give it a default small value and thats it. The rest of your page is what Google will concentrate on.

I think MikeinJersey has a point here, BUT, I need to do something as I have the Welcome headers mod installed and the message is starting to crop up in my descriptions in Google :(

I have Welcome headers configured to show the message only once. But, as somebody pointed out this relies on Google using cookies, which it doesnt



So, is there a way that we could use an image, and have it display reasonabley well for resolutions 800*600 and above?

Thanks

VinylJunky

Thanks for the [HOW-TO]. It works on my board now

I love this template modification, it is so sleek. Thanks.

I understand the point of this but the welcome text only appears on the forum home display. It does not show up on any other page or in a thread view. Is using a text image okay for this then or is there some other reason that would cause Google Bots to see this on every page?

Originally Posted by libertylounge

Because of it's prominent placement on forums, they are apt to use it to describe each of your page.

Spiders can not read the text in images, yet so we should take advantage of that to keep content relevent keywords as important as we can.

I only changed the guest one, because it's the only one spiders will see.

Can you help me better understand this? As a newbie I'm missing something...

You're creating an image with text in it, but spiders can not read the text in images? So how do spiders see it on the "guest one, and how do welcome header messages show up in search engine "descriptions"?"

When you convert your welcome message to an image, the search engines do NOT see it. It will not show up in the search engine snippets, and it the text it contains will not be findable via search.

We convert it to an image instead of just getting rid of it, because we feel that it has value for your human visitors.

However, for the search engines it just gives them a less accurate view of what your page is really all about. You want each page optimized individually. To do so, you should not have generic repeated information at the top of every page, but you do if your welcome header is included as text.

Check out:
What is the Search Long Tail? - vBulletin SEO Forums

Regarding Welcome Headers, doesn't vB 3.7 have a "welcome header" system built in? is it better than the vb.org "Welcome Headers", and can it accept an image instead of a text message?

We use the Welcome Headers plugin, and modify it to convert to an image.

Yes, I know, I used it to (with an image), but I'm planning to upgrade to 3.7 when its ready, so I was wondering if anybody has used the new vB welcome headers with an image, if its possible, and if vB's implmentation is better than Ted S'.

It'd be nice to be able to remove one more mod if possible.

Originally Posted by TnTU

Yes, I know, I used it to (with an image), but I'm planning to upgrade to 3.7 when its ready, so I was wondering if anybody has used the new vB welcome headers with an image, if its possible, and if vB's implmentation is better than Ted S'.

It'd be nice to be able to remove one more mod if possible.

I personally still continue to use Welcome Header hack. I think it is better than vB's notices.

Is there a conditional to see if the visitor is a bot and then not display that text?

I realize that's a little like cloaking, but it's not bad cloaking.

Eric

I used to be concerned that an image map replacement for the text version of $welcomeheaders would not have a seemless, uniform look on the site when viewed in different resolutions. However, after trying out the image map for a while, I think it is a good thing that it does not display "width to fit" on the page. It stands out more to human visitors and is likely more effective.

For the graphics challenged, I used GIMP and this tutorial for creating image map code and it was a snap.

How can I make an image that will stretch nicely on my fluid site?