Logo Optimization Tips for Improved Local Ranking
While optimizing various aspects of a website, SEO experts often ignore the website’s logo. If you are one such SEO then optimizing the site logo can definitely provide an advantage to your site by improving rankings and visibility, and can also propel that site above the competition.
Once you insert anchor text for every logo on different webpages of your site that are linked to your homepage, then the relevancy of your homepage will receive a boost in terms of the used keyword phrases.
As a SEO, you may already know that you can provide text to any image through ALT text. However, you may have ignored the growing importance of adding a relevant ALT text to each IMG tag since search engines have become much more intelligent in recent times. However, rather than merely adding ALT text by just inserting your brand or business name, you can leverage it by adding more related text to the IMG tag, which could indicate the nature of your business or specialization.
However, care must be taken to avoid keyword stuffing or inserting inaccurate content that is meant to fool visitors. In case your logo does not have any text in its image or only a single word then you can try inserting more words into the logo image itself, which in turn will allow you to extend the ALT text as well.
In addition, you should also ensure that your logo file name contains your business or brand name for added keyword association. Your logo also has to be linked back to your own homepage and needs to be its canonical link. You can optimize it a lot more with a Title attribute to that link. You must remember that your Title text should be exactly the same or very similar to your ALT text.
Since Google now offers Schema markup for logos, you should take advantage of this feature as it can permit your logo to be displayed in the Knowledge Graph Box. Appearing in such organic search results will certainly boost visibility as well as clickthrough rates while boosting rankings in coming times.
If you are using WordPress then you should avoid themes with CSS sprites and those displaying logos as DIV images since they prevent use of ALT text and Schema.org markups. A better option would be to use the traditional IMG tag even though it may result in negligible slow-down of your website, which is anyway not a huge factor in search rankings.
You must also remember to use the same logo image on all social media sites including Google+. You can also optimize EXIF data of your logo and even provide geolocation to that logo since most search engines including Google can now read that data. You should additionally add Open Graph coding of Facebook for your website since you will be able to utilize that logo image in several interfaces present in Facebook.
If your logo is made up of only white color and is placed over a transparent background, then you may lose out on rankings since Google will not be inclined to display such logos in Knowledge Graph. The background color of Google is white and this may make your logo seem invisible. So, adding different colors or changing from a transparent and white combination makes sense if you want to impress Google.
You can also try using the author tag along with the Schema.org markup for your logos. As a small business, displaying a photo icon will boost the trust factor during related searches. If you are using various SEO tactics to boost rankings then you must certainly pay heed to the above logo optimization tactics to receive improved local search rankings.
