Starting with SEO #3 – Anchor text and Images

Anchor text

Anchor text is a clickable text on a HTML page, that takes the user to another HTML pages either within the same site or a different site.  This is usually achieved using the HTML tag.

Better the anchor text is, easier it is for the users to navigate and simpler for the Search engine to understand the page that is being linked.

Some good practices for anchor text as per Google SEO Starter guide:

• Choose descriptive text – Avoid text like “click here”, “this” etc. for Anchor tags
• Write concise text – don’t use anchor tags for a complete sentence or a paragraph
• Format links so that they are easy to spot – avoid CSS styles that make links look like normal text
• Remember these tips while linking for internal pages too – this will help the Search engine to navigate your site better

Images

Bloggers use images a lot in their posts.  Some of these images do serve as hyperlinks, taking the user to other pages.
A HTML developer definitely knows about an attribute named “alt” in the HTML tag.  The primary purpose of this attribute is to display an alternate text, if the image could not be displayed for any reason.  But with reference to SEO, the “alt” text serves some additional purposes:

• “alt” text serves the same purpose as a Hyperlink text, if the image is an Hyperlink – This helps the Search Engine to understand the target location
• Optimizing Image file names and the “alt” text makes it easier for Image search projects like Google Image Search

Again, following is an excerpt from Google SEO Starter guide for good practices with images:

• Use brief, but descriptive filenames and “alt” text
• Supply “alt” texts, especially when using images as links
• Store images in a directory of their own – example, http://domain.com/images
• Use commonly supported file types – JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP

Keep watching this space for further tips.

Previous Posts in this series:

• Starting with SEO – #1
• Starting with SEO #2 – Page Titles and Meta Tags