Advanced Hyperlinking Strategies

There are some advanced things you can do when considering your link text that will allow you to gain even more benefit from them. Let's look at some ideas and suggestions, as well as think about some more high levels strategies revolving about link text.

Place Plain Text Around Links

Placing some plain text next to your links is better than just having bare links all over the place. Many search engines use the text surrounding a link to help figure out what a link is about. Although I would not go so far as to place plain text in your navigation menu, and it may not look good down near the bottom of your page near the copyright notice, but when available, its always a good idea to add a line of descriptive text next to your link.

Varying Your Destination URL?

There has been a lot of debate in the last few years about whether when you are out there submitting your links, asking for links, and linking your own pages up, whether you should change out the destination URL. What I mean is, 'domain.com' and 'www.domain.com' usually point to the exact same place. Also depending on my website's setup, something like 'domain.com/index.php' or 'domain.com/index.htm' also points to the same place.

So should you be changing up the destination URL constantly? No. Should you change it up a bit here and there? Yes. You should find the scheme that you prefer most, and stick with that 80-90% of the time. So if you decide that you like the 'domain.com' version better than the 'www.domain.com' version, then stick with that most of the time. Sticking with the same scheme will give you better search engine results in general, however you should vary it using the different flavors of your URL at least 10% or so of the time.

How Many Links Per Page?

This is certainly a good question, and something that really deserves its own page. However with the present state of the web, I would personally not put more than 30 links on one page at any given time. Now there may be some exceptions to this. For instance your own sitemap page, or a page that has 50 links that all point to other areas of your site. That's not a big deal in the eyes of the search engines. What I would avoid however, is placing large amounts of links to external sites on one big page. You don't want to have your page be viewed as some sort of link farm right?

What If My Link Has To Be My Name?

Blog comments are a common place where there are links that are expected to be a name. Many blog systems allow you attach a link to the name you use to post comments. This free link of sorts tends to be highly abused however, and the blog owners do not look too kindly upon people who jam a bunch of keywords in as their 'name' when posting comments. This smells like spam and they will delete and/or blacklist you in a second. However, you can often give yourself a 'title' type of name. As long as you are backing it up with a long,useful,relevant comment that blows away all the other comments on the page, most blog owners would be happy to put up a comment like that.