The Importance Of Clear Hyperlinks To SEO and Usability

When I took Web design 101 almost a decade ago my professor told us nothing about how important it is to not only include authoritative and direct hyperlinks in the text on our sites (that is links that not only link to a company's Web site, but to the area of a reputable entity's site where the product or service being discussed is displayed).

Today, users expect clear hyperlinks. "Click here" does nothing to:

• Provide the user with information and/or a service in a timely manner
• Increase the SEO of the site
• Encourage the user to navigate to other areas on the site
  

But writing clear hyperlinks is no easy task. As writers it requires us to step outside our creative thought process and go back to the research process to think of the terms we used when we were creating that very same story.
So while I am speaking of writing text for hyperlinks, I am going to refer to the basic prinicple of writing for the Web, which I think is best explained by the great usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. The first duty of writing for the Web, Nielson says, is to write to be found.

Some of Nielson's tips:

• Precise words are often better than short words, which can be too broad to accurately describe the user's problem.
• Use keywords that match users' search queries: Queries are typically 2 to 3 words long
• Supplement made-up words with known words: It's tempting to coin new terms because you can own the positioning if the term catches on. But, more likely, people will continue to use their old terminology.
  

Getting back to hyperlinks. Jagdeep.S. Pannu, Manager of Online Marketing at SEORank, a leading Search engine optimization services company says that the hyperlinked text is actually searched by Google when its spiders crawl the site every 15 to 45 minutes or so. Here is what he had to say:

"The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: ‘allinanchor:keyword’, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This further implies that Google’s algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby making it evident, that Google considers it an important pointer to page relevance. Our internal research leads us to believe that weight given to anchor text has been raised recently in the Google algorithm. With these changes, it is possible to enhance your website’s ranking by using the right keywords in anchor text."

For the purposes of news writing, I believe it's important to keep Nielsen and Pannu's advice in mind, but here are some of my tips.

• When linking to another story always use the headline. Topical headlines are searchable, so readers are more apt to find them in search engines. And by using the headline in the hyperlink, you will naturally describe the story before and after the link, therein providing the user and search engines with keywords that will clue them in to the nature of the linked text.
• When linking to a company drill down as close to the product or service as possible. If the company has released a product, link to the page for that product--not to the company's home page.
• When referring to a report or white paper, link to it by name. Google the paper and find the proper name. Doing so will be of great use to the reader and to the site's SEO.