We have to cover a double whammy today. Something so simple, yet so wrong, and you are probably doing it in every HTML marketing email you send and on every page of your website.
It's your logo.
You probably already know that you should always put your jewelry store's logo on your site, and at the top of all your marketing/newsletter emails. That makes complete sense, and you're probably saying "of course!"
Both your website programmer and your email marketing person probably spend a lot of time maintaining your website. If they have good computer skills they will keep their computer files organized and easily understandable. They even probably keep all your websites images stored in a single directory too.
It's these organization skills that will work against your online SEO effort!
Ask your website person to tell you the file name for your jewelry store's logo and they will probably say one of these:
store-logo.jpg
store-logo.gif
store-logo.png
logo.jpg
logo.gif
logo.png
Now go look on your website and right click on your website logo and view the image. You will probably find the same "logo" file name.
File names like that are great for their organization, but absolutely horrible for your SEO. We've seen countless jewelry store websites and jewelry store emails. In fact, as of this writing, the Tiffany & Co. logo on the top of tiffany.com is called "logo.gif" and the same logo from their regular email is called "Logoblue.gif."
The simple fact is that even the big boys fall prey to this problem, because most programmers and most email marketing guys simply do not understand the overall impact.
What is the impact? If you're a "logo" victim then take a close look at your Google Webmaster Tools account. Somewhere in there you will find a list of keywords your website ranks for. Among that list you will find the word "logo." It may only have a few keyword impressions every month.
Perhaps a few hundred impressions isn't anything to squabble about. No harm done, right? Wrong!
Look at it from the Google side. They are giving you potential traffic for the word "logo," which means they are ranking your image names. There's good potential to capture a wider audience if you rename your "logo" to one of your popular keywords, or a keyword phrase you are trying to rank for.
Some examples to help with local website ranking include:
jewelry-stores-totowa-nj.jpg
jones-jewelers-totowa-nj.gif
diamond-rings-totowa-nj.png
Some examples for the email are:
jones-jewelers-in-totowa.gif
click-view-images-to-see-this.png
jones-jewelers-monthly-newsletter.jpg
Tiffany-Co-monthly-email-please-click-view-images-to-see-latest-jewelry.jpg
We're not concerned with SEO in the email, but we do want to entice your readers to view the images in your email. Email programs usually show the file name until the user clicks the "view images" button. File names like those shown above are friendlier and could even speak to the customer. This is certainly much better than them seeing "Logoblue.gif"
So there you have it; proficiency on the part of your website programmer does not produce good SEO or customer experience.
There is one of those small places where you're bleeding SEO. Have this fixed; it's easy to do.
As a final note, if you're using WordPress or some other (overly) complex CMS the image file name might be a mixed mess of letters and number. In that case this is not an easy fix and you should consider moving to a different CMS... ouch; that's a bad cut.
