Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

During my day I get to read many, many blog posts and I have noticed a tendency to create links that aren’t well described. The most popular links are underlined in common words like, “here” or “this”. Despite our search engine preferences, all of us want to be able to search more easily and find higher relevance results. As it is widely known, links play an enormous part in determining relevance. And thus, if we improved our linking practices, we would help search engines pick up and understand the most precise nature of the link. I can talk about it, but the best thing will be to illustrate examples on how to do better linking.

Examples:

Read here for the list of apps launched at the f8 event. – Mashable

Instead, a better linking approach would be:

Read here for the list of apps launched at the f8 event.

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Original Link:

Clearspring powers this interactive widget for the Indianapolis Colts, for instance (the NBA is another big partner we mentioned previously). – Mashable

Better link:

Clearspring powers this interactive widget for the Indianapolis Colts, for instance (the NBA is another big partner we mentioned previously).

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Original Link:

Previous TechCrunch coverage here. – TechCrunch

Better Link

Previous TechCrunch coverage on Vyew.

or

Previous TechCrunch coverage on Vyew.

In the way that we get used to linking properly, search engines will get smarter on the exact meaning of the page being linked to. So, linking properly is a way of communicating properly, not just with humans but also with robots whom are part of our audience. 🙂