Better Linking Through Anchor Text

Did you know...

Many webmasters know that the number of links pointing to your site, as well as the popularity and relevancy of the sites containing the pointer links, help to increase the ranking of your site in search engines' results pages. But did you know that the specific text of the hyperlinks is also very important to the search engines? Not only do search engines look for incoming links, but they put a premium on links in which the hypertext actually contains the search terms!

In the second example, the hypertext includes the search terms "kid's" and "reading". But note that by including the description within the hyperlink itself, the site will get a boost, not only in searches for "kid's" and "reading", but in searches for "child literacy", "authors", etc.

By changing the style attributes of color, underline, etc, you may be able to give the link a more pleasing appearance, while keeping all of the search terms in the actual link. (If you use CSS you have more options in that regard.) Note that in the following example,
the entire line is part of the hyperlink:

Are you using images or banners as hyperlinks? If so, it helps search engine placement if you include a text link as well. If you're set on using an image only (or if you know of sites who only use your image) as the link, then at least be sure to use the "alt" tag on the image to include search term keywords; some search engines look at the "alt" tag when evaluating hyperlinks. Examples:

Bad:	(no meaningful "alt" tag)
Better:	("alt" tag contains search terms)
Best:	Lisa Thiesing Children's Books: author and illustrator's website of kid's literature

If we have a link to your website on our links page, or if you are requesting one, please let us know if you have specific keywords that you'd like included in the hypertext. We'll put them in there for you if we can.