WHAT MAKE A GOOD LINK FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION PURPOSES ?

The links debate rages on and on. We share the opinion that it will take a radical shift in the way search engines work for links not to be a major part of the SEO armoury. However, not all links a re born equal and it is certainly not a case of who can get the most links.

Links should always be from relevant sites, ideally from within relevant content, on relevant sites, with your targeted key phrase as the anchor text and to a relevant targeted page in your website. We've always advised text links to be the ones to go for, and these to be based around targeted phrases and not just your url name.

However, as with all things SEO there are debates raging around the subtleties of links. Some people (often designers without much SEO, accessibility or usability knowledge) like to have graphical links rather than text links. Whilst these can be useful, they do need to be formatted properly and use the appropriate accessibility attributes such as the ALT tag to perform well.

There is also a view that image links merged in with < H > elements do well. However, this could appear to be overt spamming and maybe a technique that Google hasn't yet picked up upon. We wouldn't advise upon doing anything that wouldn't be done for its own sake and therefore be something that Google could penalise you for.

Futher reading : Image based links vs text based links