Don’t Make Text Part Of A Banner

How is your banner structured? Some people embed text on the image of their banner. We’ve seen people use banners like this on their website.

The Problem With Embedding Text On Your Banner

But you really shouldn’t. It gives users a bad experience. How?

A banner like that will shrink down to the width of the screen when users open your website on, for example, their phones. And because the screen is small, the text also goes really small that it becomes unreadable.

But aside from that, the other issue in having text embedded on the banner is it’s still not searchable by Google. So even if you have the title of the page in the banner, Google still doesn’t know what the title of that page is.

It’s important that every page has a title. The title—it’s called H1 tag—is a very strong indicator to Google what the content of the page is about. If you have two H1 tags, it can confuse the search engines. But if you don’t have one at all, it will really hurt the ranking of your page in Google.

What We Recommend

One alternative is to provide a different banner for the mobile version so it can change from displaying a big banner to a small banner at certain breakpoints.

Make sure your banner doesn’t include the heading if it is at the top of the page. You can also set your banner up to use live text so it’s readable by search engines and that it can be resized for mobile responsiveness.