Summary: Understanding how links work will help you use links to build a better website, and to obtain better inbound links to your site, building your relevance, authority and trust in the eyes of the search engines.
A hyperlink – i.e. a link – in HTML code is formatted like this:
<a href=“http://www.angelseo.co.uk”>Angel SEO</a>
In the above example, the code is telling the browser that the text ‘Angel SEO’ (called the ‘anchor text’) should be linked to the page http://www.angelseo.co.uk. A search engine crawling through a website and finding this link would make some assumptions:
1) That the link is in some way relevant to the page on which it appears; and
2) That the page it is linking to is relevant to the text ‘Angel SEO’.
Other attributes can be added to the code to make more complicated links. For example, the title attribute is there to add information about the nature of a link. This information may be spoken by a user agent (for example, where a partially sighted user is viewing the page), rendered as a tool tip, cause a change in cursor image, etc.
Here’s an example:
<a href= “http://www.angelseo.co.uk” title =“Dave Cain’s Website”>
The title tag should be used for additional information that is to be passed on to the search engine bot. People often make the mistake of duplicating information in the link title attribute, and the search engine can just ignore it or regard it as spam. But in the above example, we’re telling the search engine that this is ‘Dave Cain’s Website’ (it can already see that it’s Angel SEO in the URL).
The nofollow attribute may be added:
<a href= “http://www.angelseo.co.uk” title =“Dave Cain’s Website” rel=“nofollow”>
This is so that the link doesn’t pass on any link juice. Why should you care? The more links you have from your page, the less link juice they can pass on. So be selective about who you give your valuable link juice to! Yahoo!, MSN and Googleall support “nofollow”.
Other attributes
These are less used attributes that can be used in a link.
- name – gives the link a name so it can be used as the destination of another link.
- hreflang – specifies the base language of the document being linked to.
- type – advises the type of content linked to.
- rel – mentioned above but governs the relationship between the current page and the page being linked to. Takes a list of link types as a value, space separated (mostly you’ll just see this used with ‘nofollow’).
- rev – describes a reverse link from a anchor specified by the href attribute to the current document.
- charset – describes the character encoding of the page being linked to.
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