Could you all please look at my website: http://www.more-solutions.net. I rank around #3 on MSN for 'jewelry software', in the 50s-70s on Yahoo, but I'm not even in the top 200 on Google. The Googlebot visits my site at least once a day, but I'm worried that I'm still in the sandbox, although I first launched the site in January 2004.
I would not embbed text into images. I would recommend using CSS to achieve the same look, so the spiders can read the text links. And I would put my keywords in the links.
The text isn't in the image. The whole site takes advantage of CSS to do exactly what you described. Point taken; good suggestion.
I know I rank well on some keywords, but none of the popular ones. Why do you think I do so well on MSN (#3) and fail on Google (#703)? I'm expecting my PR to go up from 1 to around 3 or 4 at the next update, as a result of link building.