It’s all about good strong descriptive titles: first of all, in your blog posts and web pages. But that’s only half the battle, or maybe even less. Here is the single-most important thing I’ve learned about how search engines work.

The HTML code behind a typical hyperlink on the web looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.timboucher.com/”>Tim Boucher</a>

The “a” stands for “anchor” and the “href” stands for hypertext reference. The two elements, along with the link label (in the example above, “Tim Boucher”) and the closing “/a” tag form a hyperlink.

Search engines have automated bots, spiders, or crawlers which go out and scan billions of web pages, following the hyperlinks between documents to determine information about how it all fits together, and roughly “what it means.”

So, aside from your actual original written content (paramount on the web! search engines know if you’re copying or duplicating content elsewhere) and your good clear descriptive titles, your hyperlinks become all important.

When a hypothetical indexing bot comes along to check out this page, it would see the URL in my example link above, http://www.timboucher.com/ and then it would look at the text between the opening and closing “a” tags, the link label, and it roughly interprets the link label as being additional descriptive meta-information (information about information) about that page.

So, let’s do some basic examples to show what I mean:

- Tim Boucher
- web author
- itinerant scholar
- circus & performance history, self-mastery

Each of those links points to the same place, the top level of my domain. But each one has a different descriptor about what the URL it’s pointing to is all about. Coming up with creative and accurate link labels is THE BEST thing you can do on the web (or one of the top three, maybe), because it teaches search engines new human-made data about information and its relationships to other sets of information.

Imagine now if you have 100 or a thousand bits of data from many different sources, each of which is a link label pointing to the same URL. The search engine will use all those little bits, bundled together, to formulate a more accurate representation of what your actual content is. So use good descriptors, and don’t make links around stupid, meaningless or extremely common words like, like “this,” “that one“, etc. Be selective. Be descriptive. Be accurate.

This is especially useful for self-serving interests, like I’ve already illustrated. I have close to seven thousand pages of unique content on this domain, created over the course of five and a half years. Information not especially current can fall to the way-side, but if you’re regularly seeding links back to your old content into newer posts, it’s going to be a nice little reminder for web crawlers (and human readers) that you have other good material buried much deeper in your site. And if you’re using good descriptive link labels, then you’re going to be adding value to everyone’s experience of the web!