Internet Marketing for Small Business > Hyperlink

Considering Hyperlinks for Search Engine Optimization

Question: What's a Hyperlink?

Answer: A Hyperlink is a web link from one part of a website to another. That's easy. When I describe our Orlando Internet Marketing Firm and link back to the homepage, that's via a hyperlink. Simple right?

Wrong.

Sometimes the longer we are exposed to the Internet and more confident we feel in our our own abilities the more we tend to overlook the finer details. For instance if you are a fairly quick reader you might not have noticed the error in the previous sentence. If you re-read this paragraph more slowly you'll notice two our's instead of one.

As we speed through our daily world of Internet Marketing we take things for granted, a hyperlink is a link to another part of a website.. enough said.

Forewarning, nothing here is ground breaking. Just a trip through memory lane.

Cloaked Links

I'm sure none of us has ever cloaked links or hidden redirects before..*cough*. At anyrate in some instances where SEO is not concerned it can have its useful purposes. A cloaked link may keep the visitor or search engine in the dark as to where the final destination will be. Often these hyperlinks will lead the visitor to a different page then anticipated, or display different results based on location or whether or not the visitor is even human.

Hot Area Links

Remember when laying out a portion of a image as a link was the all the rage? Hot links allowed you to turn any portion of an image into a hyperlink. No more pesky photo editing, no more creating buttons, just sheer html magic.

Hotlinking

Not to be confused with area links, hotlinking is a grey hat / black hat tactic to increase search engine rank. It involves loading images on a different website off of your own website. The result is a "link" back to your website done under the radar by most. The results with this strategy are real if you are able to locate a website to use your images on.

For more ideas on the hotlinking strategy look into the black-hat techniques section.

XLINK

Xlink is developed for use primarily with XML and offers additional functionality for XML documents and linking. If you are not familar with the benefits and uses of XLink check out the Xlink Wiki. I'll be adding more on XML optimization in the near future.