SEO Design Issues - Mapping or Slicing?

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In many cases, we may experience with this issue. Designers always prefer mapping since it’s very easy to implement. It’s our responsibility to get sliced images if we want image links to index. When we need to do slicing and when we need to mapping?

Mapping

“Use Map” is an attribute of Image tag which used to hyperlink areas of a single image to various destinations.

In my header I have mapped the image and give links to social media sites like face book, linked In etc. Thats an example for image mapping.

Below is the source code for that.

<img src=”/social.JPG” alt=”Social Media” width=”104″ height=”24″ border=”0″ usemap=”#Map” />
<map name=”Map” id=”Map”><area shape=”rect” coords=”0,4,20,24″ href=”http://www.twitter.com/elanhere” /><area shape=”rect” coords=”20,0,40,21″ href=”http://en-gb.facebook.com/people/Elan_Here/1354053568″ /><area shape=”rect” coords=”40,2,60,31″ href=”http://www.linkedin.com/in/elanhere” /><area shape=”rect” coords=”59,1,81,22″ href=”http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/seobyelan/” /><area shape=”rect” coords=”81,3,102,23″ href=”http://elanhere.stumbleupon.com” /></map>

That is a single image and its segments are hyperlinked to the corresponding URLs using “Use Map” attribute.

Will Google follow & index the links present in mapped Image?

Definitely no! Google can not follow and index the links present in mapped image. If you don’t care about indexing image links, then go with mapping.

Slicing

Slicing is nothing but cutting an image to two or more images. If we need we can give hyperlink to each of the sliced images with usual anchor tag.

Above are five different images hyperlinked to the various destinations.

Will Google follow & index the links present in Sliced Images?

Yes, with one condition! All the hyperlinked images should have alt tags. With out alt tags, Google can not follow and index the image links.

If you want your image links to get follow and index by Google, then do slicing with alt tags.