In part one of "The UV SEO Series", I introduced the series. In part two, I wrote about having one website address. In part three, I wrote about internal linking strategies. In part four, I emphasized meta descriptions and meta tags. In part five, I introduced keywords, keyword density and keyword placement ideas. It's time to move on to offsite SEO by starting with the format of a link, commonly called a backlink because it links back to another site and not internally.
Backlink Format
The best and most effective backlink is a link that targets a specific keyword on a specific page of a site. Any backlink is better than no backlink, but targeted backlinks drive traffic to specific pages instead of to the home page. Here's an example of a targeted backlink:
<a href="http://www.untwistedvortex.com/2008/08/13/nursing-school-philippines-necessary-equipment/" title="A Nursing School in the Philippines and Necessary Equipment" target="_blank">Philippine nursing school</a>
Used in context, it looks like this: Interested in a career in nursing? Take a minute to examine a Philippine nursing school as one option out of the many options available to you.
Let's break down the attributes one by one.
The Hyperlink Reference Attribute
The "a" stands for anchor and "href" stands for hyperlink reference. I'll bet you'll have a hard time finding the abbreviation for "href" defined anywhere else.
The actual link, as it appears in a browser, is what's assigned to the "href" attribute. One mistake I've seen a lot of is when people link to a comment instead of a page (with "#comment-19139" or something appended to the URL). If the comment gets deleted, the link dies. It's now called a "dangling" link. Dangling links have absolutely no value at all.
The Relationship Attribute
I left the "rel=" attribute out of the example because you don't need it to produce a backlink. If you want to comply with Google's rules, you'll want to add "rel=nofollow" to backlinks that are paid for. If you're looking for traffic from other search engines, you should know that they ignore this attribute — it's a Google thing only.
The Title Attribute
Some people are under the mistaken impression that the title attribute is treated like a keyword. Instead, it's treated as content by the search engines. It's a usability and accessibility attribute. The best description is that it shows you where you're going before you click a link.
Even though it has no keyword value, I recommend using it as it is intended. It makes your links a lot friendlier than they would otherwise be. How many times have you hesitated to click on a shortened URL (like TinyURL) because there wasn't anything telling you where you were going to end up?
The Target Attribute
This attribute is valid in all HTML markup except HTML Strict and I really don't know why the strict document type disallows it. One theory is that the user, not the browser, should determine how links behave. I say balderdash. The vast majority of users have no clue how to control the links they click on.
The target attribute for backlinks should always be target="_blank" where as internal links shouldn't specify any target attribute at all. Does anyone still use frames? Frames are the only things that the other target parameters deal with.
Finally! The Anchor Text
This is the meat of the link, the coup de grace, the defining blow. If you use an anchor text like "here", "click this" or something similar, you have killed the value of that backlink as far as targeted traffic is concerned. Keywords are competitive and those keywords are in the billions.
If you don't know what the anchor text should be, you can do one of two things. You can ask or you can guess. Asking will get the better result, obviously, but guessing should be pretty simple. Just look for the main topic and work from there.
Coming in Part Seven
I wrote from the viewpoint of providing backlinks to someone else, but the rules to applying backlinks to yourself still apply. In the next part of the series, I'm going to show you some places where you can create your own backlinks and point them anywhere on your site without it looking like search engine spam (and without pissing off other site owners).
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