Increase your Google rankings by modifying one small thing on your website

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I wanted to shed some light on a small SEO tip that many people overlook. Although most people are aware that they should be doing this, I’ve noticed that surprisingly few people take the time to make sure they practice it when handling SEO on a website. I’ve even noticed a lot of people that offer Internet marketing and SEO consulting with this issue on their own site.

So what’s the tip?

Simply use an alt tag for the image you are using as a logo in your header.

Here’s 3 reasons why this is important:

1. Internal links are extremely valuable

Good site structure and proper internal linking can be the difference between a first page ranking and a first place ranking. For many websites, every page is linked to from every page from within the site navigation. However, for websites that target keywords with deep pages or blog posts that may not get links from the main navigation, it’s important that you work in links to these posts from other pages and posts on your site.

For example, on this site, I have a post about Google Places SEO, or optimizing your website to rank in the A to G listings within Google for local keyword searches. Once this post gets pushes off my front page, it won’t have a direct link from my homepage. So what I should do is make sure I work in some links to the post whenever I mention Google Places SEO.

It’s important to remember that Google ranks web pages not websites. Nicely anchored links from other pages on your domain are just as valuable as links from outside your domain.

2. Only the first link to a specific URL counts from any one page

This might sound a bit confusing so I’ll use an example.

You’ll notice that I linked to that blog post about Google Places SEO above. That link will pass Pagerank and anchor text and will tell Google that essentially, that page is about “Google Places SEO.” However, many people think that if you send another link to the same page that it will send double the link juice and value. This is wrong. Stop wasting your time.

If I were to put a link right here to that very same page, Google won’t care. The first link is what matters – especially when it comes to anchor text.

It’s not going to hurt you if you have multiple links going to the same URL, but you must remember that anchor text only passes through the first link.

3. You can and should optimizing the alt tag for your logo

Now that we know that internal links are important and that the first link is what matters, we can quickly see why optimizing the logo’s alt tag is important. Your logo is usually the first link on every page that points to your homepage.

The alt tag acts as the anchor text when linking with an image. This means that you are likely sending dozens or even hundreds of high quality links to your homepage from within your website without using optimized anchor text. Even if you have another optimized link to your homepage in your navigation bar or sidebar it won’t matter because your first link has no anchor text or alt tag.

Follow this one simple tip and you’ll surely see an increase in brand name related rankings.

Give it a shot and send us an email to let us know how it goes!


Want more SEO tips?

Check out our comprehensive SEO guide!

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Jordan Schelew

Jordan has been working with computers, security, and network systems since the 90s and is a managing partner at Websavers Inc. As a founder of the company, he's been in the web tech space for over 15 years.
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