Basic HTML For SEO – Part 5, Links and Images

TweetWeb pages are about links. The whole reason Dr. Berners-Lee came up with the idea of the World Wide Web was so that information could be linked together to make things easier to find. In some ways he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. In the “modern” web, links need to be formatted properly in order for search engines to be able to use them. Search engines not only use links to find more content on the web, but also to help determine which content is more relevant. I include images in this discussion because images are quite often links themselves.

The link tag is very easy to understand. For example, a link to this blog is set up like:

<a href=”http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com”>For great web marketing information, visit The Crossing of Marketing and IT</a>

There’s really nothing to it. The key thing to remember is to make the text between the tags relevant to the content the link points to. If at all possible, avoid generic phrases like “Click Here” or “More Information.” The more descriptive the link text the better.

Images are also somewhat simple to set up:

<img src=”/images/BowlOfFruit.jpg” alt=”Example picture of a bowl of fruit”>

It’s a good idea to give your images a logical name; a name reflecting what the image is works quite well. This helps you keep track of them and helps the search engines catalog them. The “alt” part of the “img” tag is very important. This not only helps search engines, but it also helps your visitors using screen readers make sense of your page since they can’t see what the image is.

There are a myriad of additional elements which can be added to the “img” tag, but for our purposes the basics are all we need.

Combining links and images is also quite easy:

<a href=”http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com><img src=”/images/BowlOfFruit.jpg” alt=”Example picture of a bowl of fruit”>
<br />For web marketing information, visit Crossing Marketing and IT web site</a>

Notice I also added some text inside the link tags. Adding text is good for search engines since they don’t read images. Again, it’s good to make that text descriptive to what the web site is about.

Tags: html, in-house, seo