Since the web’s humble beginnings, designers have been pushing the envelope to better express themselves and make websites that are as beautiful as they are search engine friendly . The ability to use more fonts has given designers a giant boost when it comes to creativity.
Fonts: The Usual Suspects
Macintosh and PC computers often come pre-loaded with fonts that are named the same and who’s appearance is nearly identical on both platforms. These are the fonts considered to be web safe. There are only a handful of font faces determined to be web safe: Arial, Trebuchet, Georgia, Palatino, Times New Roman, Verdana and a couple of others that are not usually nice enough the be bothered with like Comic Sans.
Web safe fonts are important because they let your web page be viewed the same for both computer platforms (Mac/PC). If you wanted to show a font that’s loaded specifically for a Mac, when a person on a PC views the page, the font will change to one available on the PC. This can cause all kinds of formatting problems that will make your page messy.
It used to be that if you wanted a unique or special font on your website it had to be converted into an image in order to be viewed correctly by both Macintosh and PCs. When it comes to being indexed by the search engines this is a big problem. Headlines and other keyword rich text contained in images is ignored.
Enter the New, Hip, Designer Fonts
The language for web pages has evolved significantly since its early days and now designers have a special tag called @font-face. This tag allows them to install special fonts which are compatible with Macintosh and PC computers and all of the newer browsers. These fonts are galaxies removed from what we recognize web fonts to usually look like. Here are just a few examples from @font-face provider Font Squirrel.
The Best Thing About These Awesome Fonts
They can be read by search engines. Yes, it’s true.
The Second Best Thing About These Search Engine Friendly Fonts
They are free. (It just keeps getting better and better!)
Before Diving Into @Font-Face
Before you tell your web designer to change out all the fonts on your site, these fonts do require a tiny bit of load time (think seconds). During the time the font is loading a default font is visible. Because of the load time you don’t want to use these special fonts for all of your web page content. However, they are great for headlines, and any other copy you want search engines to be able to index.
Right now @font-face is just one method to change default fonts, but because of the ease of use and number of font options available we think it’s the best of the options. Font Squirrel and Fontex are two sites with many fonts to choose from.
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About the author: Jeune Ortiz is VP of Marketing and Creative Director at future-ink. With more than 20 years of experience in graphic design and marketing, Jeune brings extensive knowledge and creativity to each website and internet marketing solution to grow your business.
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