Simply stated, sIFR is a SEO friendly way to use your custom fonts, without the need to use an Image. It’s a search engine friendly method for using your custom fonts.
Who is sIFR for? It’s for any website that has been using an Image or Flash as the H1 (or other headings) because of the need/desire for custom fonts. sIFR is your SEO solution to finally optimize your H1 tags. In short, sifr replaces short text blocks with Flash of selected typefaces. Technically speaking, sIFR is a text replacement method using JavaScript, Flash, and CSS.
While most people simply create images when they need a custom-type font, sIFR can dynamically create short text blocks using whatever font you want (while still rendering the text with a default font on non-Flash browsers). In general, if you want to utilize better typography, while maintaining the optimization of your H1 tags… sIFR might be the easiest way to pull it off.
So, now you can still use your own custom fonts. No images needed. This technique allows the use of h1, h2 tags to have its copy replaced by a Flash using the desired font.
Google will crawl and index the text content of sifr Flash files. Hence, it’s search engine friendly.
Here is an example of a website that does this. TV Land: (example shown using Firebug).
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sIFR has been unsupported for years, and Flash is a technology you should try to avoid (slower load times, heavier pages). For that there’s Typekit, Fontdesk and Google WebFonts.
Nice post, Shimon. Cufon works well also–it basically does the same thing as sIFR. There are some other options as well, like FLIR, typeface.js and the built-in @font-face attribute in CSS, which would be best if it was fully adopted.
sIFR is best in it’s ability to be selected in all browsers, but I suggest using the one you feel most comfortable with. Make sure to do extra browser testing–especially in the dreaded IE6–when you play with text replacement.
usefull information
I dont use this at the moment.
I stay away from flash normally.
Thanx for a good post.
hi,
how can we optimize the website for Google Search Engines?
hi,
optimization all meta tags is so good for seo promotions
This has been a very significant blog indeed. I’ve acquired a lot of helpful information from your article.
sIFR and Cufon both struggle with Internet Explorer 9, the best to use is Google Webfonts or the CSS3 font face.
This is very useful for me.Can you share with us something more like this ??? Thanks.
Yeah, I’m totally agree with you here.. thanks for making me aware about this topic. I got many informative points here.. Keep going on this way in future also.