Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [50]
Figure 5-3: A heat map from Enquiro’s eye-tracking study, 2005
Use Hypertext Links
One of the main factors in SEO is links, including links coming to your website, links within your website, and links to other websites. Links are the currency of authority in the search engine ranking formula. Why? We link to information and content that helps, provides answers, or entertains. We link to it as a recommendation to others because they may appreciate the information contained on another website. Really, a link is a word-of-mouth recommendation!
Here is the basic format of the link:
linked anchor text The link anchor text is the text that typically shows up as blue, underlined text. When website visitors see blue underlined text, they know automatically that it is a link. It is one of the earliest learned behaviors of Internet users. Now, I’m not saying that all your links need to be blue and underlined. However, every degree that you vary from the “universal behavior” is another degree of difficulty that you create for your visitor. This is especially true if you create links that do not use underlines, are a vastly different color, or are combinations of these. Again, I am not saying that all links have to be blue and underlined. I am just saying that blue underlined links are understood by everyone! As a corollary, if you have content on your site that is blue and underlined and it isn’t a link, you should change that immediately and stop frustrating your visitors. Chapters 16 and 17 will deal with the importance of incoming links from other websites, as well as navigational links. In this section, I want you to evaluate how your pages link to each other within the content, not the navigation. A good example of how this can apply to your content is the Lenovo Olympic website from the Beijing Games in 2008 (Figure 5-4). There is a paragraph of content that reads as follows: Lenovo is offering limited-edition notebook PCs inspired by the Lenovo-designed Olympic Torch for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. Learn more. Figure 5-4 Ambiguous link text There are a couple of issues with this paragraph. The first issue is that there are three independent thoughts and one call to action. If you were to click Learn More, what would you learn more about? The laptop, the torch, or the games? This is why I hesitate to use link text like “learn more” or “click here” or “read more.” Granted, most SEO specialists would tell you to hyperlink any amount of text with keywords in order to gain rankings. I tend to take the reader’s side of the equation. If I see that “Lenovo laptop” is the link text, then I automatically know that if I click that text, I will go to a page about the Lenovo laptop. Contextually, it makes sense to the reader, and it helps the search engines determine the context of the linked page. Coordinate Miscellaneous Page Elements After the page title and headings, everything else counts minimally by itself. The idea is that all of the on-page factors work together in concert to create a context of the page. Repetition of keywords does little to create the same effect. As search engines improve, more emphasis is placed on the sum total of relevant content, even when using alternate versions of words. The semantics of words and concepts is the future of search and matching results with a searcher’s intent. alt Attributes alt attributes are content that will be displayed when an image used on your website fails to load. Regardless of the cause, the alt attribute shows as an explanation or instruction for the visitor (Figure 5-5). If the image is used as a link and the image contains the only call to action or instruction, the visitor can be left without any information to move forward in the process of there is no alt attribute. alt attributes on linked images provide a very small fraction of relevance toward rankings. alt attributes on nonlinked images may provide little relevance, if any at all. Most SEO specialists agree