I’ve blogged and written before about using your tagline (or slogan) in your logo, I personally do not believe it’s practical for long term logo usage–taglines and slogans can change from year to year or even from season to season. There is another good point to bring up when it comes to the internet–whether to use a text tagline, or an image.
It’s actually a very easy question to answer. Does your tagline include any of your keywords? If that answer is yes, then your tagline should be text and should be placed in your website header.
This was a lesson I learned early in my internet career. When I went online in 2002 with my Stationery shop, I decided that my creativity meant that I could design and implement my own website. I had a logo for “Classic Creations Stationery & Gifts” and so I used it. Within 6 months of starting my website, I had learned a lot about keywords and SEO. I realized that “Classic Creations” could be anything and while it was important to my current catalog customers (for finding my site), my crucial keywords were “Stationery and Gifts”. Thus, I made the decision to use them as a text tagline in my page header. Of all the things I did back then, that was the smartest! My traffic tripled within the days and weeks following that change!
If your tagline is something akin to “Your One Stop Shop”-there are two issues at play here…
ONE: it obviously is not important to your SEO, so use an image with a cool font.
TWO: WHY aren’t you using keywords in your tagline and taking advantage of the benefits it will provide to your Search Engine Optimization??? Just adding one word would make all the difference: “Your One Stop Stationery Shop”. And suddenly the text “stationery” is on the top of every page of your site.
Something very important to consider…
Sam asked:
Interesting article. I actually use two taglines on my employer’s website. One is a generic “slogan” that I have never really understood. The second I aimed to give visitors a 2 second introduction to what we do; it’s pithy, but not very exciting.
For the first tagline I place it as part of the logo. Yes, for shame, but it does load faster with one image instead of two. However, even though it is generic, it does have some keywords in it. Since it’s part of the logo, I make sure to put the full company title and tagline in alt text. What are the SEO benefits and hindrances of this approach?
Nola answered:
Good Question…the answer is that the Search Engines no longer use image Alt Text to determine relevancy. When you have a text (keyword rich) slogan it will be considered…because it’s text.
Expert SEO Researcher, Jerry West explains:
“According to a Google engineer, what you should do is create an ALT tag that is relevant to the picture, so it gives the user a good experience, including the visually impaired. The ALT text is indexed, but it is down graded in the algorithm. The reason?”
‘We see ALT text as relevant as the Keyword Meta tag,’ said the engineer. That should say it all as Google has never used the Keyword Meta tag due to the high spam rate.”
Tags: header • logo • seo • slogan • tagline • website