Linking Guidelines - Links to Images, Content

admin — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:33:00 +0000

Links to Images

Studies show that people don't usually expect to find a photo or image at the end of a text link that does not refer to the link as having an image. There are a few ways (options) to handle this.

Have a link that says: "(photo)" or "(image)" after a given description text, and link the text to the image. The disadvantage here is the anchor text becomes very generic, if it is to one of your own images in, say, Flickr.
Have one or more thumbnails to Flickr images, using the Flickr Gallery tag, which is easily managed (add or remove images by adding/removing tags to images in Flickr). This is great for usability, and the Title can be preserved within the IMG tag.
Have a small or medium-sized image on the page near the text (no link or link the image out to a larger image). Again, Title can be preserved and a link out to the full sized image (lightbox enabled) is possible.

Links to Content

Links are good on pages, but a small number of them are best both for user navigation of a site and for "PageRank Sculpting" tactics. Links perform several functions at the same time (for both the human and search engine). Here are some guidelines for any content creator and certain for all the bloggers and blogs/news feeds for all sites.

Page-Sized Only

Link only to content that is page-sized, and be sure to use that pages' name or something close to it. Avoid linking to sub-content within a page (e.g., Aftercare). If something is important enough, it should have its' own page, if it doesn't then it shouldn't have it's own link. This is a guideline that others may disagree with, and certainly sub-page content linking is still somewhat prevalent on the web. A better approach is a search-aware results page which highlights search terms. We feel that search is a better tool than subsection linking.

Anchor Text Length

The anchor text of a link should not be very long, from 1-5 words or so, 6-7 if you must, but must include keywords, preferably keywords to the page but also keywords to the site.

Outbound Links Important

It is just as important to link out with a few judicious links as to link within the site. Having a "Links" page is not the same thing and Google rather evaluates each individual page of a site and if all links are on a links page that page will have low value and the other pages will have no outbound links. If you can consider outbound links to things like Wikipedia pages or other forms of reference that are well known or popular (according to Google) that helps a lot.