Search Engine Ranking Improvement Series Part 3 – HTML Anchor Tag Tutorial

Part 3 of my Search Engine Ranking Improvement Series is devoted to giving you an HTML anchor tag tutorial.

If you haven’t done so, you’ll want to be sure to check out my previous posts in this series:

• Search Engine Ranking Improvement Part 1 – Keywords
• Search Engine Ranking Improvement Part 2 – Backlinks
  

An HTML anchor tag is simply a link that you place within your site to link to another page on your site or to a specific area on the same page. Anchor tags help with search engine optimization in several regards:

• They enable search engine spiders to easily move throughout your site; the more anchor tags the better

• They identify a common theme throughout your site; very important for search engine optimization

• They help to improve keyword density

HTML Anchor Tag to A Different Page

These anchor tags are not only helpful for search engine ranking improvement, but also help your visitors to easily find information that will be useful to them. And, when they remain on your site longer and visit additional pages this also sends a very positive message to the search engines and will help increase your rankings.

Examples of using the HTML anchor tag feature can be found at the top of this post, where I’ve provided links to additional posts in my Search Engine Ranking Improvement series.

The code for anchor tags that point to a different page within your site is the same that you would use to link to a page outside of your site:

<a href=”http://www.yoursiteurl.com/pagename”>Name of Your Page</a>

For best search engine optimization, be sure to use the keywords you’re ranking for within the link itself (this should have been done when you named the page you’re linking to), as well as in the text that the HTML anchor tag will display as the link, i.e., Name of Your Page.

HTML Anchor Tag to Text Within the Same Page

These anchor tags are used to direct your visitors to a specific section of the page they’re reading. Again, use your main keywords in the HTML anchor tag for maximum search engine ranking improvement.

These anchor tags require 2 separate lines of code, one that identifies the location that you want to bring your visitor to, and one that provides the text link. Examples can be found on this page, where I included an HTML anchor tag to bring you to each of the different subsections of this tutorial.

When you click on the text link that reads “specific area on the same page” your browser window will drop down to this section. As discussed above, I’ve utilized 2 sections of code to create this desired effect:

• Create the HTML anchor tag
  
  Anchor tags identify the section of your document that you want the browser window to jump to when your visitor clicks on the text link. In this example, I wanted my text link to bring readers to this section of the page. In order to do so, I created and named the tag “html anchor tag same”, and placed the appropriate code around the section header. My exact code looks like this:
  

  <a name=”html anchor tag same”>HTML Anchor Tag to Text Within the Same Page</a>
  

• Create the text link
  
  The text link contains the word or phrase that the reader will click on, and contains an HTML tag that identifies the anchor tag that the reader will be directed to when he or she clicks on the link. The code I used is:
  
  <a href=”#html anchor tag same”>specific area on the same page</a>
  
  

In this example, you’ll notice that I’ve used my main keyword, HTML anchor tag, as the tag identifier – giving my page a little bit of extra help in terms of search engine ranking improvement. Once the anchor tag was set up, I simply added the # sign before the tag name that I assigned, to direct the text link to use the anchor tag.

And that, my friends, is one of the elements of proper search engine optimization. A little help here, a little help there – many different strategies that when woven together can create SEO magic.

Tagged as: anchor tags, Blogging, html anchor tag, Internet Marketing, Online Marketing Tips, search engine optimization, search engine ranking improvement, seo