Internet Marketing And SEO From A Different Point Of View
You could be forgiven if you found the title of this post perplexing. However it summarizes an important and powerful method of providing focus in what you’re doing. Depending on the method you used to get here, you may even have not seen the true title of this post. Continue reading “_ First”
Hyperlinks have never really got the respect they deserve. Without them the Internet would be impossible. The word is often now shortened to link and this word is often bandied around without thinking about the mind-opening implications bound up in that hyperlink word.
The term “hyperlink” was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson. The Wikipedia explanation describes what he had defined
Hyperlinks are the basic building block of hypertexts. For example, some key words in a wiki such as Wikipedia are highlighted, and provide links to explanations of those words at other pages in the same wiki.
In directed links, the area from which the hyperlink can be activated is called its anchor (or source anchor); its target (or destination anchor) is what the link points to, which may be another location within the same page or document, another page or document, or a specific location within another page or document.
He also coined the word hypertext and the associated word hypermedia. He bemoaned the fact that the latter had not taken off and instead became what we often call interactive media.
The hyperlink concept is really very powerful. However Microsoft, as it has done with so many great ideas, did not leverage that power. It is true that files or documents in the Office Suite of programs always have the hyperlinking capability. So you will find:
Adobe also to an extent slowed down the wider use of hyperlinks since it is only recently that you can now create a PDF document with their software with active hyperlinks.
Luckily the hyperlink concept is much too powerful to be sidelined by this somewhat lukewarm support. What really caused the hyperlink concept to take off was the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. No longer would a hyperlink merely connect you with some other point in the same document. You could now connect with some online website that could be half way round the world.
The other powerful influence was that the two Google founders latched on to the notion that hyperlinks confirmed the popularity or authority of web pages. They then they used this concept within their search algorithm. Since for a given Web page they were interested in hyperlinks pointing to that web page, they used the term Backlink instead of hyperlink. If they had only stuck with the term hyperlink, then again the concept might have gained more general understanding.
The strength of hyperlinks is confirmed by what was written in 1999. As the ClueTrain Manifesto authors pointed out, almost everyone was hyperlinking and this was a movement that could not be stopped.
However, employees are getting hyperlinked even as markets are. Companies need to listen carefully to both. Mostly, they need to get out of the way so intranetworked employees can converse directly with internetworked markets.
Corporate firewalls have kept smart employees in and smart markets out. It’s going to cause real pain to tear those walls down. But the result will be a new kind of conversation. And it will be the most exciting conversation business has ever engaged in.
Ten years later, the strength of hyperlinks and the World Wide Web they made possible cannot be denied. Most website owners acknowledge the mutual networking benefits they receive and include hyperlinks to other relevant sites that their visitors may wish to visit. This summer there was even a question whether the BBC had finally changed policy and was using hyperlinks to external sources. The answer is unclear but the eventual outcome will undoubtedly include external hyperlinks.
The latest word from Google points to an even greater support for the hyperlink concept. The Google Webmaster Central Blog is now encouraging webmasters to include named anchors to define sections of their webpages and tips on how to do this best. This will mean that a keyword search could actually rank most highly a hyperlink to a point within a document that is deemed to be most relevant.
As the Official Google Blog explains, the aim is to enable users to get to the information they want faster. Searchers will now find additional links in the result block, which allow users to jump directly to parts of a larger page. This is useful when a user has a specific interest in mind that is almost entirely covered in a single section of a page. Now they can navigate directly to the relevant section instead of scrolling through the page looking for their information.
We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn’t involved in any way, so you can’t pay to get these links). There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages. First, ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1”), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors. The new in-snippet links only appear for relevant queries, so you won’t see it on the results all the time — only when we think that a link to a section would be highly useful for a particular query.
If you have such web pages, this should ensure greater visibility and higher rankings for sections of your information-packed pages, so this is something to carefully consider. As a small test, you may wish to see how these internal web page links for Therapeutic Riding Associations and for Associations for the Disabled rank in Google searches for those terms. Once indexed, they should rank highly in related searches. Those hyperlinks certainly deserve some serious respect now.
The box you see at the top of the right sidebar, which is labeled Popular Tags, contains what is called a tag cloud. All the SMM blogs are now displaying such a tag cloud since, as explained elsewhere, Tags Attract Eyes.
Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.
Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.
Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.
Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).
To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.
That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.
Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.
The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.
We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.
Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA