Back to basics: clean up your link names

Friday, January 22, 2010, 11:44 AM
Website Design by John (Article #263)

One of the biggest things search engine providers -- and thereby search engine users (your potential visitors and customers) -- rely up is the quality of the text in your links.

While you don't want to engage in skeevy techniques that amount to Googlebombing, you do want to do your level best to write your links cleanly for the actual thing that page you're linking to is about.

The classic bad link name is "click here". While it makes a great deal of sense within a sentence, for example, saying "for more information on ridding your property of unwanted widgets, click here", it doesn't make life easy for Google, Yahoo and Bing's bots that are indexing your page.

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As a content creator, it is your social responsibility to ensure that the pages those bots index have good, meaningful links on them. The entire notion of a usable semantic internet hinges on good links.

So, if the page you're linking to is about "removing unwanted widgets from your notwidget pond", that entire string of text needs to be the main text inside the A tag of your link.

It represents one of the big shifts in editorial decision making in the age of the internet. And it is shocking how much of it goes to waste. Don't let your perfectly good links go to waste in the search engine simply by poor linking. Improve your links. Thing when you're righting about what part of the sentence is the semantically linkable part. Keep that in your head at all times when you are writing for the web. Not only will you improve your own website, you'll improve the general internet.

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Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design