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You click through hundreds of links each week, when you surf the net, so you probably know what a link is. It’s a piece of text that takes you to the next page when you click it. However, from a search engine optimization perspective, there’s much more to a link.

Lets start with the HTML structure of a link. In HTML you define a hyperlink (an anchor) with the ‘a’-tag. In its simplest form, the HTML code to create a link will look something like this:

<a href=”http://take.me/away”>Take me away!</a>

The ‘href’-attribute tells where the link should take you and the text between the tags is displayed, but you probably knew that much. There’s not much you can do differently with the ‘href’-attribute, since it must point to the target document. However, be sure to either always use http://www.example.com/, or always use http://example.com/ to avoid duplicate content penalties.

The anchor text is the most important part of the link SEO-wise. The anchor text tells search engines what keywords the target document is relevant for. Never use ‘click here’ as the anchor text, if you can use a more descriptive one. Don’t just target the main keywords, keep in mind the long tail too.

You are able to create a link using just the ‘href’-attribute and some anchor text. However, there are other attributes that can be used in the anchor tag. Of the 10+ allowed, only two, ‘rel’ and ‘title’, are thought to have SEO effect.

The ‘rel’-attribute defines the relationship of the target document with respect to the source document. There are a number of values allowed for the attribute, and you can use many for one link by separating them with spaces (not commas, as is often done). The relationship type with most SEO effect is ‘nofollow’. It is a common standard by some of the most important search engines and tells the crawler that the link should not be followed.

Different search engines treat ‘nofollow’ links in different ways. In Google, such link will not pass PageRank, but Google may follow the link and crawl the target page. Yahoo! does pretty much the same, but even a ‘nofollow’ link can add keywords to a page in Yahoo! search. MSN/Live search discards the link most thoroughly, pretending it does not exist.

Another link relationship that is often used is ‘bookmark’. It is used to identify permalinks on blog s (though that wasn’t its original use). Its SEO effect has not been proved, but since such links by the original definition should point to a “key entry point”^[ref] into a document, search engines can crawl them more frequently. As I said, no proof exists, but you should use it for permalinks.

The other anchor attribute that can have an effect in SEO (though it is debated), is the ‘title’-attribute. It should be used to explain the link when the anchor text is not clear. You should always make the anchor text clear, since that has more effect, but you can add information with the title tag. Most browsers also show the title as a tool tip, when you hold your mouse over it, so it should be information that readers can use - not just an endless list of keywords.

To combine all of the above together, the link you use as the permalink to your post should look something like this:

<a rel=”bookmark” title=”The Anatomy of a Link - permalink” href=”http://blog.yourwebsiteprofit.info/2007/10/the-anatomy-of-a-link.html”>The Anatomy of a Link</a>

This article is part of the Internet Marketers Group Writing Project.

by Sutocu | October 11, 2007