Anchor texts or link lables have always been a subject within webdevelopment, that doesn’t get all the attention it deserves. In short the anchor texts can determine the ranking search engines will award to the page that’s linked to.
Photo by paal
Links connect all the pages on the internet with each other. It’s important that people link properly, for both visitors and search engines. Anchor texts are the visible, clickable texts of hyperlinks. But why is it so important to use quality anchor texts and what exactly are quality anchor texts?
How do we define a quality anchor text?
A quality anchor text, is a anchor text which enables the visitor to know what’s behind the link, without having to click on it. To understand all this better, some examples are required.
Without the wrong and right labels, it shouldn’t be to hard to pick the best anchor text, is it?
WRONG: To get more information about webmasters, click here.
CORRECT: You can get more information about webmasters.
Great benefits for the visually impaired
Not the ‘normal’ visitors and search engines have the most benefit of quality anchor texts. When we take a look at the visually impaired visitors, who often have a speech-computer, the true advantage of having quality anchor texts becomes obvious.
People who are visually impaired and are using a speech computer, have the option to let the computer just read the links on a page. When we don’t use good anchor texts (like in the above example), “here” and perhaps “click here” is all the computer will say.
Those links are of no use for visually impaired and shows the largest benefit of quality anchor texts.
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I think hyperlinks are an underestimated part of content. It is incredible how many people only use links such as “here”, “more”. Let me also add a read more to 13 additional rules to make quality hyperlinks.
Thanks for posting your article here, it’s a great source of information!
I must admit I never thought about speech computers and visually impaired people when designing pages before.
It would be an interesting challenge to actually put some additional thought on that aspect during design.
The main reason I wouldn’t use anchor texts like And here to somewhere else in the beautiful caribean is: Such a long under-lined text looks awful . A decent “here” or “more” looks less intrusive.
One could just change the appearance of anchors via CSS of course. But:
In the long run though I think content tags/parameters and new classification tags will become prevalent for search engines to rank as well as speech software to read from… This trend is already visible and Google and Yahoo are had their first successes encouraging this.
(Will work better also with image maps and other graphical links…)
As a comment to the “13 additional rules”…
# Do not open hyperlinks in a new page
Actually, this is an ongoing long term discussion mentioned as early as 1999 on Jakob Nielsen’s item on the top ten design mistakes of 1999. Inexperienced users will never find your website again after their “back” button mysteriously changed to grey. Experienced users will forgive you and will put up with webpages opening in the same screen.
I’d disagree to this rule. First of all, arranging a sabre-tooth tiger safari will be harder to than finding a user that “Inexperienced” these days. With logical or not so logical exceptions, my rule of thumb would be:
1. If the link leads to an outside domain, open in new tab/window.
2. For internal navigation, use same window. (After all you can always work with table and/or or frame based navigation menues here…)
(Late around here, so just my quick two cents as a celebration of losing my Google ranking to a certain someone…)
@Suriel,
I must admit that I had the same opinion about opening pages in new screens as you are describing above. I am still doubting. Anyway, on my weblogs I start using same screen links while in my content/affiliate websites I open links in a new screen. Ths thing is that we are experienced web users. If I talk to inexperienced guys many of them use the back button and get irritated if that doesnt work (ie page opened in new screen). maybe I will post a separate article on the subject later on.
Regarding the anchor text I disagree with you. Links like “more”, “here”, etc are useless from a usability and user experience aspect. Also for SEO purposes you do not take the maximum. I am convinced that providing proper outgoing links can help your own ranking (although minimal), but that is also sunject for another discussion.
You could rewrite the link “And here to somewhere else in the beautiful caribean” into “beautiful caribean”. The thing is, webusers scan webpages. Often they do not actually read. This means that hyperlinks will draw attention. By adding text into the anchortext you draw visitort to exploring your website.
You might be right on the minimal increase of search engine ranking through descriptive links. Will re-think about it…
The sheer amount of data in the Internet these days will ask for the increased use of Microformats and class identifiers in the future would be my guess.
(hCard, hCalendar, XFN, geo… - tags)
Search engines will make increased use of them. And as a user you have far better selection criteria.
The best way to get the kind of traffic I personally want (as someone who - at least atm - only works on non-profit sites/projects) is mouth propaganda.
Create good content with a clear end user group in mind, then get out there and find your end users on forums or wherever.
Example: How did I get here?
By Coen posting a comment on my mind’s trashcan - my blog.
@Coen,
Would it be possible to add paragraph tags? I prefer writing in paragraphs of 3 max 4 lines to improve readabiliy. The posts above are very ling and difficult to read.
I could write shorter posts of course but sometimes the subject asks for more room.
I’m tracking down what bug is causing this. It should make paragraphs automatically, but I think it’s a combination of plugins that causes the trouble. I will keep you guys posted!
I do appreciate you guys writing these great comments, keep up the good work!
It looks like it’s fixed now. Please drop me a line if there are more problems!
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