11 March 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Using anchor links to improve Usability and SEO

In search engine marketing, your own website is your strongest marketing tool. Frequently, in search engine optimisation (SEO), marketers consider external links a higher priority than optimising a website to its full potential. Bigmouthmedia knows that link building is important, but how can website owners maximise their website to aid in the natural link building process? Bigmouthmedia believes part of the answer may lie in a document's usability, making use of links within HTML documents (anchors) to aid and maximise a website's internal and external performance. So an anchor is a term used to define a hyperlink destination.

Much to many search marketers' dismay, copy heavy (muchos) webpages tend to drive more organic search engine traffic to a webpage over a multitude of keywords rather than one high profile, generic search term.

With that in mind, one of the problems that search engine marketers face is convincing "the brand police" to allow more rich copy to be added to "real estate" webpages. On one side of the coin, bigmouthmedia agrees: adjusting aesthetics, branding and design on key pages may impact the user's perception of a brand, which is a harsh judgement period of around 5 seconds online. On the other side, we can argue that more traffic and, inevitably, sales will be driven to the website.

To fight the case of the search marketer, bigmouthmedia may have the perfect medium in the form of anchors. Anchors can be used to break down copy heavy documents into more manageable chunks.

In the early days of the internet, university webpages used to be structured with a header tag and then list of documents contents, which were anchors taking the user to sections within the document. As a user landed on the page, they could then jump immediately to the section within the document to find their target content - a usability dream!

Now, if you apply the traffic value gained from increased copy to the usability aspect of allowing users to jump to sections within a document, any budding web designer should be to mock-up a wireframe of a webpage incorporating more copy within a key landing page, along with usable anchors that will allow the user to jump to more specific sections of the document.

Throw in other on-page factors that many search engines consider as ranking influencers - like header tags - and you have a very usable and well optimised webpage.

Bigmouthmedia believes that usability should be a key part of any search engine marketing campaign. By making documents usable, there is a greater chance that users will find sites both more informative and likeable. This could strongly increase the probability of the user creating an external link to the document. These links are of high value to search engines ranking algorithms, so any natural gain we can make here will prove beneficial in the long term.

Recently, Yahoo! rolled out the enhanced search (Yahoo! Search Monkey) feature for Wikipedia's search results. Funnily enough, the enhanced part of the search results was the inclusion of anchors to allow users to efficiently jump to certain areas within Wikipedia's webpages.

Unless you have had your head buried in the sand, you will be well aware of Wikipedia's natural search rankings - could this be the ultimate plug for anchor links?

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