Getting text on an image into a search engine

This may be confusing, but what i am looking for is a way to ensure that search engines will see whats written on an image. I can understand that the search engines don't use OCR, so how can i make it "visible" to the engine, what i want them to see for that image?

Those texts can be captions, comments, or sometimes dialogs in comics. The solution i need, would not show anything else on the page, but i can supply the text that is in the image in a separate manner.

Anyone got a good idea on how to manage this?

Hi Christian,

You can't really get SEs to read text written *on* images, but you could use some CSS tricks and a background image.

[HOW-TO] Make your Welcome Headers an image! might give you some ideas.

I read through that thread already, but it is the opposite of what i want. I don't want to replace text with an image, i want to ensure SE's understanding something i have on an image. For example I would like to do something for a comic where the dialog and captions are visible to search engines, while not being displayed to the normal users.

Isn't that what alt text is for?

Originally Posted by Simon Moon

For example I would like to do something for a comic where the dialog and captions are visible to search engines, while not being displayed to the normal users.

That will be called cloaking and because of cloaking your site can be dropped from search engine indexes

This could be considered cloaking. However, ALT tags are one way to get a description of an image. There may be some methods of CSS that could work.