The Anatomy of an Optimized Hyperlink

June 1, 2009 // Author: Jacob Stoops // 138 views // View Comments

Optimizing your hyperlink can add extra value to your site's overall SEO.

Creating hyperlinks is one thing. Optimizing them is a whole different story. With the way the internet is structured, with webcrawlers crawling from link to link, you would think that the idea of optimizing your hyperlinks would be a more widespread practice.

Sadly, this is not the case…

I see way too many hyperlinks that link to the text “click here” and “read more”. Unfortunately, (and I need to correct this default WP tag to make the post shorter) even I’ve been guilty of using it. The problem is, nobody is searching for the terms “click here” or “read more”, so why would you want to use those for your anchor text?

A well-optimized site has a good internal link structure that passes the “link juice” all around the site. Additionally, a well-optimized website should also have a lot of inbound links that use quality anchor text.

For the purpose of this article, we will talk more about what you can do to optimize your site’s own hyperlinks.

The Right Anatomy

A well-optimized hyperlink has 2 things:

Good anchor text
A link title

What do you mean by “good anchor text”?
This means that you should try to use the keywords that your desire to show up for within the anchor text of your link.

<a href=”/yourlink.html”>Good Anchor Text Goes Here</a>

How will anchor text help?
It is a well-known fact in the SEO Community that search engines (Google most prominently) use links as high value factors when deciding to how to rank your website.

That being said, they also thoroughly examine the “what” people are saying in the anchor text when they are linking to your. If people are linking to you using a certain keyword, then it is more likely that your site is relevant to that search query, making it more likely you’ll rank for that query.

What are link titles?
Link titles are just what they appear to be…titles for your links. They work kind of like alt tags on images, only rather than describing the image they describe the page that is being linked to.

<a title=”Valuable Description Text” href=”/yourlink.html”>Anchor Text</a>

How do I use link titles? Use a link title to describe the page that is being linked to. Try to keep it short-and-sweet, much like an Alt tag.

Also, don’t spam. If you spam here, you’re shooting yourself in the foot, but that is pretty much the case with anything in SEO.

What will all this get you?
Lots and lots of link juice within your own site! Search engines will be able to make some extra inferences about your site based on your own internal links structure. Additionally, you may be able to target some keywords you didn’t think of before.