Why Text is King
The Internet is built on text. The foundation of the web was built with HTML (hypertext markup language) which provided tools for presenting text on a computer screen. That legacy remains the foundation of all Internet activity today. Of course, images, video and all sorts of graphic embellishments have been added to web site presentations, but images remain essentially invisible to computer search engines because computers aren’t very good at recognizing visual context. The fact is, computers don’t really even understand words, but they are very good at recognizing strings of letters and matching one string to another, which is the basis for search engines. (It’s also a pretty good reason to use spellchecking.) We can make images visible to search engines by attaching word tags, but in the end it’s still a matter of using words to communicate.
