Should the Logo Banner also be a text link?

Question

I noticed that when all CSS is removed, my site doesn't display the Banner (obviously), so I put a text link back to the home with my keywords (which is also the site name) to display for search engines and for non-graphic readers.

Now that this link is there, the first link on every page of my site is my keyword and return link to the home page. It's not an H1, but it's bold.

Is this good for SEO or overdoing it? I'm not sure what the best practice is here, but I heard it was good to have your keyword first. I just don't want it to reduce the weight of other pages h1 tag or the more specific topic pages.

Answer 1

Text links with keywords in the anchor text are better than images - even images with keywords in the alt text.

But I strongly recommend you shift your focus back to what's best for visitors. Give them a good experience, build good content people would want to link to and engage with your community to raise awareness of that content.

Answer 2

What I would do is in your header template wrap the logo in a conditional function like below. Then when people and bots are on your home page the logo isn't linking to your home page in essence creating a loop. Once visitors move on to pages across your site the logo will be linked back to the home page. This is used on some major websites and is not bad for SEO. There's just no need to link to your home page from your home page.

<?php
if(!is_front_page())
{
    //Logo with link
}
else
{
    //Logo only
}
?>

Answer 3

You can increase the keyword relevance of a page if you add an alt tag talking about what is contained within the banner and if the banner is hyperlinked you can add a title tag to the link to increase it slightly more.

Example: <a href="https://www.test.com/" title="A cool test page"> <img src="https://www.test.com/img" alt="a great test image"> </a>

Answer 4

Both @Ben and @Anagio make good points but you can satisfy both crawlers and users very easily without showing bots different code and offering an additional benefit to visually disabled users.

This code:-

<a class="logo" href="/">
  <p>Your Site Name</p> 
    <img src="logo.png" />
</a>

With the following CSS:-

.logo p {text-indent: -10000px;}

Shows your users a logo or other graphic while leaving the text intact for crawlers and visually disabled users.