Fonts on the web have been causing designer headaches since the earliest days of the internet. The problem stems from the fact that your browser cannot display any font that's not already installed on your computer. While designers have spent years collecting fonts (and there are thousands of options), we couldn't really use any of those fonts for website text without resorting to an ugly trick called text as graphics.
What's wrong with text as graphics? Three things. First, graphics take a long time to load.
Second, they don't scale when screen resolutions change or when users zoom their browser screens. Perhaps most importantly, text as graphics cannot be seen by search engines because Google cannot read pictures! This means that any text as graphics on your site are essentially invisible to web search. If SEO is search engine optimization (and it is), then text as graphics would be its nemesis. Is your menu done this way? Invisible. Customer testimonials? Invisible! You can see the problem...
The solution is Google Web Fonts. These are fonts that, when properly wired to a website, download to your computer automatically as the browser page is being loaded. Et voilá, the fancy fonts work on your site. Here are some examples:
Notice that all three of these examples are regular text, not graphics. You can copy and paste the text into a Google search box. (Try copying and pasting the text as graphics example into the Google search box.) At last, here are some real choices in fonts that work for both designers and search engines. Although the selection is limited today, this is a recent innovation and I expect the font collection will grow in time.
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