Most webmasters are very aware of the value of having quality links from well regarded, high traffic web sites pointing to their own site. Professional webmasters will always provide linking graphics, instructions and sample text to those webmasters willing to link to them.
The text you use in your recommended linking instructions will very often be cut and pasted without changes and this allows careful choice in linking text to help build link relevancy. Alt text for images can be specified as well increasing the liklihood that important keywords are included in your link.
What follows is a standard part of a serious linking campaign, Instructions for setting up a “Link to us” page from your own web site. If you wish to cut and paste from this article, be certain to be aware of the added space inserted after each left facing bracket. They were inserted to prevent the HTML code from disappearing in HTML email readers such as those at AOL and other webmail programs.
There is a little trick to providing the HTML code for your visitors to see on your page which requires some coding slight of hand. Due to the nature of code, it is meant to be invisible and making it show up *as* code on a web page requires the following:
Those that define HTML to a web browser make the contents within them disappear, so you must use unicode that defines a bracket, rather than using the bracket itself. That code is -==- for =- for the > right-facing bracket. So in order to make the HTML show up on an HTML web page, you must use -==- in place of all of those brackets in order for them to show up on screen.
The simplest way to understand this is from the following page: http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/link-to-us-pages.html All of those unicode brackets have been represented in green text on the page to help you be able to make more sense of the code visually.
It is recommended that you use a background color in the area you’ve created to display your HTML to separate it from the rest of the page.
Use “comment” tags to show the start and finish of your links.
Comment tags are designed to allow you to create instructions or comments in HTML that don’t show up in a browser. A comment tag is meant to be invisible too, so you will need to use those < and > characters to make THEM visible as well.
-==-
will show up in a browser as
and when copied from your web page and pasted into their web page HTML by your visitor, they will become invisible code used in their HTML source. The easiest link to provide is a text link and it can be used in email as well as on a web page. The following is the text we provide at SearchEngineOptimism:
<table bgcolor=”#CCCCCC” width=”371″ border=”0″
cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”2″>
<tr>
<td>
<!– SearchEngineOptimism Text Link START –>
<A HREF=”http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/” TARGET=”_top”>
SearchEngineOptimism<a/> offers a Search Engine
optimization tutorial to increase your business VISIBILITY
online<a/>
<!– SearchEngineOptimism Text Link END –>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
This appears on a web page as follows:
-==-
Note the TARGET=”top” in the code? This insures that if your link is used in a framed site, that the resulting page will break out of the frameset.
Displaying a banner or graphic for visitor cut and paste
Clearly it could get difficult showing much HTML code as text, but let’s look at how to show a graphic on your page as well. It is a preferred method of linking for some site owners and should be one or your options on a good linking campaign with allowances for different banner sizes, shapes and colors to match differing webmaster tastes and page layout preferences.
<table bgcolor=”#CCCCCC” border=”1″ cellpadding=”0″>
<tr>
<td width=”475″>
<!– SearchEngineOptimism Link START –>
<A HREF=”http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/”
TARGET=”_top”>
<BR><FONT FACE=”arial, helvetica” size=”1″>
</A>
<CENTER>
<IMG SRC=”searchengineoptimism.gif” width=”468″ height=”60″
alt=”Wanna Be Seen? Let SearchEngineOptimism show you how to
gain visibility for your business online!>
</center>
<A HREF=”http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/” TARGET=”_top”>
Search Engine tutorial about gaining visibility online</a>
</FONT>
</CENTER>
<!– SearchEngineOptimism Link END –>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</table>
This appears as on YOUR web page as:
-==-
You must then provide a copy of any images you are offering as
linking graphics to download and save from your page.
<table border=”1″ cellpadding=”0″ bgcolor=”#FFFFFF”>
<tr>
<td width=”475″>
<center>
<font size=”3″ face=”arial, helvetica”>
<b>468X60 “Wanna Be Seen?” banner
</b>
</font>
<p>
<font size=”3″ face=”arial, helvetica”>
<a href=”http://searchengineoptimism.com/”>
<img src=”searchengineoptimism.gif” width=”468″ height=”60″
alt=”Search Engine Optimization tutorial about gaining
visibility online” border=”0″>
</a><br>
<a href=”http://www.Searchengineoptimism.com/”>
<font size=”2″>Search
Engine Optimization </font>
<font size=”3″ face=”arial, helvetica”>
</font>
</a>
<font size=”3″ face=”arial, helvetica”>
<a href=”http://www.SearchEngineOptimism.com/”>
<font size=”2″>Tutorial
</font>
</a>
about gaining visibility online
</font>
</center>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
</table>
Provide instructions to the novice webmaster on the selection and saving of any graphic image when you provide logos, banners or graphics to link to your site something like the following.
To save any of the images to your hard drive press your right mouse button (Mac users hold down your mouse button and a menu will pop up) click on the option to “save this image” select a drive and/or directory on your computer and you’ve got it! Then cut and paste to your page the appropriate HTML code from below the image you choose.
The importance of setting up a linking page on your site can’t be underestimated when it comes to gaining that additional link traffic to your site. It is quite simple to do, no matter how hard it is to explain! 😉
Good luck with your linking campaign!
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
http://WebSite101.com and blogs about SEO at http://RealitySEO.com
where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.
