There is a right way to link.
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And a wrong way.
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Lets go over a few reasons.
Links are a websites best friend.
SEO and browse traffic both feed off of inbound links. For this reason I highly recommend linking from your website to websites that you like. This helps your users find similar websites AND it helps out your compatriots.
Title tags
title=” {insert title here} ”
Always use title tags on your links. In fact use them on everything you can get away with, but especially on links. This servers two purposes.
When a user rolls over a link, the title will pop up
giving more information as to what is being linked to. This is inline with the w3 accessibility standards, very important.
As spiders crawl your website, title tags serve as a way to tell the spider what the link is about. It is best to drop keywords into the title tag that are relevant to the topic or site you are linking to.
The Text
<a… ….> {insert text here} </a>
The text is the most important part of the link structure. What you put in between those anchor tags is going to dictate to both your users and spiders what the link is about. This holds more weight than the title tag.
- Use descriptive text for your user. This means not using terms like “click here” or “check it out”
- Wrap all the text that may apply to the link in the <a></a>.
- Toss in a few keywords. This is mostly for the spiders, but its a very nice gesture.
rel=”follow”
rel=”follow” is a less important measure and is only meant for SEO. This also only effects Google. There is a method in Google to tell spiders NOT to follow a link. That is rel=”nofollow”. It was designed as a way for commenter’s on blogs to be able to post links without sniping Page Rank. From that rel=”follow” was created as a standard way of flipping the nofollow toggle the other way. In reality, Google will crawl a link WITHOUT the rel=”follow” but I am of the opinion that it is good practice to have that rel in your links.
Deep Linking
Deep linking is a method of linking to content deeper in a sites structure. Example is instead of href=”www.fryewiles.com” you can link to a more specific page href=”http://www.fryewiles.com/flash.html” This provides a better quality link for your user (sending them to the specific page instead of the homepage). It also really helps the target site by providing a deep link for spiders to follow. This increases that page’s search visibility.
Links for Users
Links should always be useful for your user. If a link does not help your user, don’t put it. This is hard for SEO minded people to follow, as they seem to only set up links for page rank flow and index assistance. Internal links (links within you site) are a great way to move users around, keeps them from getting bored.
Links for SEO
Links for SEO are more and more common. As a rule of thumb, if you like a site and can give it a link on your site, do it. This can be in the form of a blog post or a link in a paragraph. Especially if you put some nice keywords in that link, your link can be a real help to them.
When not to link?
It is a good rule of thumb not to link to sites you don’t trust. Don’t link to sites that have views that may offend or put off your user base. Remember that you can’t control what another webmaster puts on there website. You CAN control if you link to them or not though. So stay vigilant.
If you get in the habit of linking out to other sites or using deep links, you should run a broken link checker. Google will return any number of link checkers, but the broken link finder that I use is www.dead-links.com. You can enter your URL and it will scour your site for broken links. This is a very good service. You don’t want broken links as it frustrates your users and can needlessly drain some of your pages pagerank.
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