The web itself is built on the very concept of hyperlinks, if you go back 10 years this was the definitvely largest difference between the web and an encyclopedia (conceptually, except for speed of retrieval and all the "logical" stuff) this means that links are pretty darn important for the information society to actually prevail and throw us out of the dark ages of big media corporations monopoly on information and thereby making information available en-mass and a commodity available for everyone. Puuh... Long sentence... ;)
The above image is a testimonial to that for those who knows the story of
the pagerank algorithm and in fact the very foundation of at least two of the richest guys on the planet, so obviously this is important also for egocentric reasons. So now we've established why links are so important for OTHER people, RICH people in fact, but what does it have to do with *MY* links then?
How to be a friendly linker
For those who have studied
Search engine optimization this will be common knowledge, but most haven't so I'll do the writeup here;
Anchor texts are crucial to the whole game.
Anchor texts are the stuff you put inbetween your <a href="...> and your </a> HTML elements. Anchor texts are one of the primary causes to popping high up in searches on e.g.
Google and other search engines.
If you look at my links on this page for instance you will see that I am linking to wikipedia's SEO article with the words;
search engine optimalization. This is also the H1 element on that wikipedia article in addition to that search engine optimalization is also probably written in bold, italics and so on in that article. Now when Google and Co sees all those factors put together it can pretty safely conclude with that this is an article about Search Engine Optimalization in the index of Wikipedia since if it was about something else I would probably use *ANOTHER* set of words inbetween my links to that article.
"Click here" anchor texts SUCKS!
Here's a funny one for those who haven't seen it yet. Go to Google.com and search for
click here. The reason why the download page for Adobe Acrobat Reader is at the first for that keyword combination is because so many people have PDF documents on their websites for download and then they supply something like;
click here to download Adobe Acrobat reader. So Google therefor thinks that the Acrobat Reader Download page is about the concept of "click here" even though it is about reading documents in WYSIWYG and actually have nothing to do with neither
"click", "clicking" nor "here" what-so-ever.
Lesson learned is to give accurate information to not only your readers but also the
information search highways of this era (Google and Co)
So if you're reading an article about a new an cutting edge Ajax Library which you would want to create a blog about, like for instance Ra-Ajax then you should link to it like this;
I've been testing out Ra-Ajax a very cool Ajax Library for ASP.NET and Mono instead of something like this
cool Ajax library, visit the guys here. I do not want to be number one in Google for "visit the guys", neither "click me" nor "download". However I would like to rank great on stuff like;
- Ajax Library
- Ajax for ASP.NET
- Ajax Window widget
- Ajax Calendar widget
- Ajax for Mono
- Open Source Ajax Library
- ...and so on
Now I have hopefully given you knowledge and enlightened you in an area you are happy about and at the same time I have told you how I would like *YOU* to link to http://ra-ajax.org (or pages within that domain) now you should write an "article" about how you would like users to link to YOUR site. But remember to provide valuable information at the same time, after all information is what it is all about when it comes to search engines. If you have nothing intelligent to say, you might as well "shut up".
If you do however you would increase the likelyness of others linking to you in a friendly way and making the world easier to search and in general a better place for information junkies like me.
And this is not spamming the search engines, in fact this increases the quality of the content on the web since by doing this people will easier find the content they are looking for since Google and Co will have an easier job figuring out which keywords to toss your way. Couple that knowledge with PageRank and similar "popularity" algorithms and you've got the perfect foundation for the third information revolution and the world becomes a better place!
Very often you can find overlappings between creating a better world and following your own "egoistic" goals as long as you don't feel for
taking stupid shortcuts...
...and there I did it again ;)
Have a nice day :)
Thomas Hansen