Promotion Tip

Promotion Tip:
Harness The Power Of Links

by Larisa Thomason,
Senior Web Analyst,
NetMechanic, Inc.

November 2002
Vol. 5, No. 21
• Promotion Tip
• Accessibility Tip
• Book Review


Hyperlinks are the workhorses of the Web. Site visitors use links to jump between sections of the same page and move from page to page or even site to site. Search engines also use links to index and rank pages. Every link on your site represents an easy opportunity to boost your search engine rank.

Make Link Text Descriptive

Scrutinize the content of your site's text links. Have you fallen prey to the "Click Here" linking strategy? If so, you're wasting a great opportunity to use link text and attribute values to increase your site's keyword density score.

Consider these two examples and assume the underlined portions are links:

1. Our index contains over 300 homemade ice cream recipes!

2. Our index contains over 300 homemade ice cream recipes! (Click here)

If the site is targeting the phrase "ice cream" or "homemade ice cream", the first example promotes those phrases much more effectively because it uses them inside the link's text.

Don't just select keywords at random. You need to selectively target those that visitors actually search on. Carefully choose your keywords with our keyword popularity tool and then include them inside link text whenever you can.

Add Those Attributes!

Link attributes give you yet another chance to add keywords to your page content and increase your site's accessibility to people using assistive technologies.

You should pay particular attention to these two attributes:

1. TITLE attributes allow you to enter descriptive text about a link. The information in the TITLE is displayed when the mouse moves over the link. Use it to add descriptive information about the link and the link's destination. The TITLE attribute works with both text and image links.

Here's an example:

Webmaster Tips Newsletter Library

If you have a compatible browser (Netscape 6.x+, Explorer 4.x+, and Opera 3.x+), you should see the link's title attribute when you move your mouse over the link.

2. ALT text is the descriptive text used to describe images. Use ALT text to boost your search engine rank by including your targeted keywords in it.

It's also very important to a page's accessibility. Visitors using screen readers can't see your images, so you always need to include an image description using the ALT attribute.

The ALT attribute goes inside your IMG tag and it can consist of both letters and numbers.



Search engines use the text in both attributes to help rank the page, while human visitors use it to get more information about the link. Browsers use them in a slightly different way:

* A browser won't display both attributes when you move your mouse over a link.
* Explorer and Opera display the TITLE attribute only when both ALT and TITLE are present. They display the ALT attribute if you don't include TITLE.
* Netscape 6.x browsers don't display the ALT tag at all. You have to use TITLE if you want popup text over images and links.

Even though link text and attributes are a great way to increase your relevancy score for certain keywords, you can get into trouble if you aren't careful. Even if you include too many keywords on the page accidentally, you may still get penalized as a spam site. That's why Page Primer calculates your keyword density score and alerts you if it's too high or too low for individual search engines.

Feed Links To Search Engine Spiders

Search engine spiders use links inside your site's navigation system to crawl through the site and index the page content. Text links encourage spiders to do a "deep crawl." That's when they start at your home page and then navigate deeper into the site until they've indexed every page.

Spiders only index pages they can find. Encourage deep crawling by adding text links if your have an image-only or DHTML navigation system. Also use a site map to create text links that lead to every important page in your site.

But even as you make deep crawling easier for the spiders, don't trust them to completely index your site if it contains more than three or four levels. Use Search Engine Power Pack to deep submit your important pages and make absolutely sure that they make it into the search engine's database.

Also remember that link popularity is an important element of many search engine ranking algorithms. When you trade links with other webmasters, make linking easy for them by giving them the complete link text so they can just insert it into their HTML code.

Hyperlinks are what make the Web fun to surf. You can follow link after link and discover sites you'd have never found otherwise. Visitors may use links on other sites to find you, but they're more likely to find your site using a search engine or directory. Use your link text and attributes to increase your site's visibility to both surfers and searchers.

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