It’s common these days to take advantage of CSS Style Sheets to replace your headers like <H1> and <H2> with images. While this makes sites more attractive it also hurts some of your search engine value by losing the keywords that could be used in those important headers.

Well here is how to use images and still get your keywords picked up by the search engines.

<style type=”text/css”>
h1 {
padding-top: 35px; /* height of the replacement image */
height: 0px;
overflow: hidden;
background-image:url(“image.gif”);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
}
</style>

<h1>Keywords here</h1>

In this example your pretty image will be used but your keywords will still get picked up by the search engines. The nice thing about this approach is that you can actually get some keywords in there that you might not been able if you weren’t using images.

For months I would run across this strange issue where occasionally a folder of images would appear to become corrupt. Because no matter how I tried to open the folder it would crash the program – even just trying to open the folder in the Windows Explorer would crash Explorer (Not Internet Explorer by the way – but the operating systems basic folder opening program).

The folder once it began crashing would crash no matter how I tried to access the photos – if I tried to open an image from that folder in Photoshop it would crash Photoshop. It was real frustrating and caused me to use an ftp program to view the files in the folder than I could click to edit from the ftp program and it would open fine in Photoshop. But this is far from an ideal workaround for a guy that edits photos all the time as part of my webdev livelihood.

So anyway, I found the solution the other day to what was causing Explorer and Photoshop to crash when opening these image folders.

It was a conflict between XP’s built-in thumbnail viewer in Windows Explorer and Photoshop’s “Generate Thumbnail” feature. So to fix you need to disable the thumbnail feature for Photoshop files by:

1. Right-click on any image file
2. Choose Properties
3. Choose Photoshop image tab
4. Uncheck the “Generate Thumbnails” option

This will disable the feature for all image files – and I haven’t crashed since!