wayne on September 25, 2008 

It doesn't matter how long you've been blogging, there is always something to learn.  In this post, we'll take a further look at the simple hyperlink and how we might further exploit some of the properties to our benefit as a blogger.

The readers and subscribers that have been with me since early this year will recall in my post on creating a hyperlink that I explained the minimum requirements to create a hyperlink.  Of course, that involved the hyperlink tag itself (the 'a' tag).  I then followed that up with a post weeks later on how to make a hyperlink open in a new window.  I'm going to take this one step further and explain another property of the 'a' tag that will help you create a better link for search engines and humans alike.

Why should I care?

When you create a hyperlink in your posts, not only are you allowing your visitors to link off to another site, but you are also allowing Google, Yahoo! and many other search engines to link out as well.  By adding a few more properties into the 'a' tag, you can give the search engine crawlers a bit more information to work with should they choose to use it.

This becomes even more important when you begin to link to your own posts as I did above.  If you take a look at the two links above, you might not notice anything different, in fact, you won't unless you hover your mouse over them.  When you do, you will see what's known as a 'tool tip' pop up.   This 'tool tip' provides even more information to search engine spiders, and also provides more information to your users if they happen to hover their mouse over the link.

Using the hyperlinks title property

The tool tip was created by adding another property to the 'a' tag.  The title property provides extended information about the link itself.  Your readers can use this to find more information about the link, and search engines can read this also find out more about the link (in terms of key words of course).

Here is what the html for a link looks like using the title property:

<a href="http://www.waynejohn.com" title="Blogger.com Help!">Blogger Help</a>

The result of this bit of html will look like this: Blogger Help

You might be able to see how this can help to better describe the link to search engines.  Because Google and other engines work off keywords, you are essentially giving them even more to work with by including a title tag.

There has been some debate as to whether Google and other search engines even look at the title property.  That said, you might want to include these to help your visitors get more info about the link they are about to click.

Do you apply a title to your links?  How might you apply this to your blog or web site to better help your readers?

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