Using unmarked links in your SEO copy

October 12, 2006 • Glenn Murray

As mentioned in my previous entry on using links in SEO copy, keywords in the links within your copy are particularly important in SEO.

Unfortunately, however, search engines and humans like different things when it comes to links. Search engines like to see your keywords used toward the top of the page. So if you’re using keywords in your links, it makes sense that you put the links at the top of the page.

Humans, on the other hand, tend to find this distracting. And because they start clicking on links before they’ve finished reading the whole page, they become easily lost and don’t grasp the intended message (or worse, don’t continue with the purchase). In most cases, visitors prefer a text link at the bottom of the page.

But there is a solution; if you have links within the main body of your copy, simply make them unmarked (i.e. remove the blue font colour and the underlining). To do this, include the following in your CSS file:

<style type=”text/css”>
<!–
a {text-decoration: none;}
–>
</style>

Then format the HTML of each link as follows:

<a href=”http://www.thedomain.com/” style=”text-decoration:none”><font color=”#000000″>anchor text</font></a>