To any company, organization, or corporation, a logo is a basic building block without which the building cannot hold. It helps with the ins...
To any company, organization, or corporation, a logo is a basic building block without which the building cannot hold. It helps with the instant public recognition of a brand, which is why a new start-up company isn't considered complete unless it has an official logo. The use of logos dates as far back as 2300 B.C, and the practice still remains with most businesses today. Make that "all businesses", because I can't think of any brand that does not have a logo. Companies need people to recognize them. Have you ever thought of associating an official logo with your brand? You might already have a logo, but how do you officially associate a logo with your official website, so that even search engines know what your logo is? Fortunately, schema.org markup for organizational logos allows you to do just that, and Google has very recently released support for it!
Using this markup, you can officially link your website to your logo icon, which will automatically get associated with your brand. Google will understand that this is your logo icon, and will use this information in search results.
Specifying a logo for your site
Suppose you have a website (www.yoursite.com). To associate a logo, you have to keep an image of that logo in a safe and secure place online, a place where you or others won't bother it. Ideally, it should be in the same place where you keep your website files (web hosting server). But you can put it in another accessible place as well, such as another server. But make sure you don't move the file around, so as not to change its URI.
You can use a multitude of web formats for your image files, such as .jpg, .bmp, .ico, .png etc. But .png is recommended, since it offers high quality with lossless compression (formats like .jpg are lossy - their quality deteriorates).
To point this logo image to Google's algorithms, you can use the following markup using visible on-page elements on their homepage.
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Organization"><a itemprop="url" href="http://www.example.com/">Home</a><img itemprop="logo" src="http://www.example.com/logo.png" /></div>
Where www.yoursite.com is the URL of your site's homepage, and www.yoursite.com/logo.png is the direct URI of your logo image.
Why use logos?
Google's algorithms will automatically associate the image with your homepage, and this information will be used in search results - the logo image will be given preference over others in the Knowledge Graph, for example. It also helps with your authority, and in the future, we can expect more applications for this feature.
With this feature, you can also set up a single logo for multiple websites under the same brand/company. And since your logo has precedence, it will replace your Google Plus profile picture in search results. We at MBT aren't using this markup, because we're fine with our Google Plus profile picture. However, we will do it once we set up a company website for our network.
Got any questions? Feel free to ask in the comments section below. And stay tuned for more updates on how Google works. Cheers :)
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