Whether you are just starting up your website or working on search engine optimization, understanding your links is vital. According to moz.com’s 2015 page ranking information, links are the highest ranking factors in search engine algorithms. Here is some basic information to get you started.
<a href="http://www.informaticsinc.com/Contact/">contact Informatics</a>
Tag to Start the Link
The a at the beginning of the line above stands for anchor tag. This indicates to search engines that the next information is a link to another page.
Link Referral Location
The code ‘href’ stands for hyperlink referral. The URL of the linked page will immediately follow this and be contained in quotation marks. The number of links may help increase the credibility of your page, but search engines will evaluate the quality of the link as well.
Visible/Anchor Text
In the example above ‘contact Informatics’ is the anchor text which gives some information to search engines about the linked page. Aim for a 50 character maximum. Failure to include anchor text of the correct length will affect your SEO rank.
Closure of link tag
The /a signals the end of the link tag to the search engines.
There are other variations in links including titles and other attributes. For example, the rel=”no follow” attribute in a link will indicate to a search engine that it should not continue with that link. This attribute could be used for a link that may have untrusted content, a paid link, or to indicate crawl prioritization.
If you need assistance with reviewing your links for search engine optimization, please contact Informatics.
