my front page is heavily graphical, and i would like to add some meaningful text for the search engines. I am doing this for my image buttons already. Would it be alright to do for a few paragraphs of text about my company as well, or will google and other search engines consider this as spam? I guess I don’t see how they could since it would be in a separate css file .
Instead of hiding it off page, what about using the descriptive text about your company in an ALT tag? It will still get spidered that way and it won’t be considered spam.
well, I was mainly not wanting to have paragraphs full of text when someone puts their cursor over an image. Is using css to hide a span considered spammy?
Yes, it is considered spammy. Keyword: hide
If the image conveys the information that you want to “hide” then it would be appropriate to put it in as an alt attribute … although search engines are cautious about pages that appear to be trying to hide text by including it in alt attributes.
If you think it’s important information about the company, why not include it as text? Maybe not on the home page, but on a prominently linked “About us” page.
So don’t use the title attribute.
The alt attribute is the text that appears for those who don’t see the image at all - it doesn’t appear when the mouse moves over the image (except if you forget to specify title=“” it will be copied to the title attribute in Internet Explorer).
People with images turned off will see the page the same way the search engines do so you need to create it in a way that they will be able to use it. The text you supply for those who can’t see the images should be what you also want the search engines to see for SEO purposes.
Hi,
It would not be punished by search engines currently of hiding something via CSS but no one would guarantee in the future. 
Bzzzt 
Google will penalise you for hiding text using CSS, if it looks as though you’re including that text for search engines only.
If it thinks the text is positioned off-screen for image replacement purposes, you’ll be OK.
Alt text is read by a screen reader. Note that only important parts of the image should be included in the alt attribute. Most screen readers chop off text past 255 characters, so please don’t use alt text to say how cool the site/product/company is.
one thing you can do i have a similar page with less images and more text or info and just link it to the your main page. Like “Text version click here” in that way google will crawl your page also.
When you hide text - its called black SEO - you shouldn’t do it. How long have you been doing SEO? Because the true SEO masters know what you just said wouldn’t work if you plan on having SEO success.
Ask yourself this; why do you want to hide the text from your site’s visitors? If it’s because you don’t want them reading it, and it’s just for search engines, then it’s unethical and it will, most likely, get picked up by Google and see you in a whole host of trouble.
As a rule, you shouldn’t be showing one thing to human visitors and something else to search engines.
As far as I understood:
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Google does not like text-hiding through css, but tries to determine if you’re trying to spam or not.
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So when I’m using the display:none or position-left:-3000px for e.g. a menu-hover effect, I won’t get banned?
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If so, I wonder how they determine this: through some semantic analysis of your hidden elements, a correlation between your hidden elements and visible elements, …?
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And what for this technique that I sometimes use: four links, each with a class on the a-element that shows a background-image. The text itself is hidden through a span with css
<a href="index.html" class="first_button_image"><span class="hide_this_text">Home</span></a>
See http://www.kreatuur.be/pcvo/iw/08_css_opmaak/oefeningen/afbeeldingen_en_seo/eindresultaat/index.html.
How fishy is this technique?
With new regulations in place specially for spamming. We are not sure of how these new changes will take into effects.
But it is definitely intended to punish spammers. So if the new algorithm takes action on hiding text, you are screwed man.
Better not try any fancy stuffs. Stick to a Alt attribute with title=“” as suggested by felgall as of now.
Basic rule of thumb:
Build your site for humans. If a search engine can’t read it, then you should probably fix your site, since it means some humans can’t read your site either. Search engines should never see something humans can’t.
Simple things like hiding things for links and what not are all fine…
If you have to wonder if it’s black-hat SEO (meaning very-very-bad-do-not-do)… it probably is. =p