Tips on effective use of Hyperlinks

Posted by Syed Hyder Ali on March 8, 2010

Text Based Navigation:

Text and CSS combination is preferred for website navigation.
Since search engines will read only the text and if links are placed to an image then search engine can’t read the text in the images. In this way you will be losing keywords which are present in the link. And the links with anchor text become important.

Relevant URL vs. Absolute URL

There is no such proven method that suggests relevant or absolute url but the preferred method is to use absolute URL (http://www.domainname.com/)

Usually a URL can be called using different methods. Like,

Option A: http://www.domainname.com

Option B: http://www.domainname.com/ (with a forward slash at the end)

Option C: http://www.domainname.com/index.hml (including the filename at the end)

Option D: http://domainname.com (without using “www”)

Option E: http://site.domainname.com/ (using a sub-domain)

For a search engine all the above 5 urls are different. Assuming that you got 100 hits to your domain using all the options mentioned above and each option got you 20 hits. Link value gets distributed as shown in the below graph.

All hits are coming to the same page but with slight change in the URL, it divided the real link juice into 5 parts. So when you are trying to promote your website, always use only one format.

Similarly, in the files when we use relative paths like: