Linking Code

[philiporchard]

When a business adds themselves to one of our directories, we want to ask them to link back to us.

How does this code look?

<p>Listed in the <a href='http://www.cardiff.co.uk/plumbers/' title='Cardiff Plumbers'>Cardiff Plumbers</a> section of the <a href='http://www.cardiff.co.uk' title='Cardiff'>Cardiff</a> Directory</p>

Should we try and have it so it appears more styled?

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[fish]

this is how it shows to me:

Listed in theCardiff Plumberssection of the

I suppose you could style it but that depends where it's sitting on a page and what that looks like .... House style and all that

 

[philiporchard]

Yes, I'm interested to know if adding more styling will affect it's SEO benefit?

i.e could I make it appear in a styled box, and still retain the SEO benefit?

If so, what might the code for this look like? Thanks

 

[peter_w]

To add a styled box "cleanly" you'd have to get them to also drop something into their css stylesheet. You can do it the dirty way by adding some code to the <p> tag directly, but most webmasters wouldn't want to do it I wouldn't have thought.

I wouldn't bother with the title part of the href. If anything it just makes links look more spammy than these days. Also, I would recommend using " and not ' in the link code.

If it was me though, I'd probably suggest using an image (with suitable alt text) rather than a direct text link. Not only is it cleaner and safer, you'll probably get more people adding the image with the link than you would the simple text. Websites tend to be far more accommodating for a small image at the bottom (some sort of crest which says they are part of the directory) than they would be a line of text with two hyperlinks in it.

 

[accelerator]

The code looks fine to me, but I would also use " instead of '. I would also say it might be worth considering a nice logo image as this will help with recognition. Host the image on your own server and refer to that so that you can update it in the future if you want to.

Rgds

 

[Blossom]

If you are sticking with text (it might be nice to offer both text and image options), then make the links bold. It's slightly better for SEO.

Also, I'd suggest doing something so that not every link back has the same anchor text - it looks suspicious if you have tons of links the same. Either code up something to randomly display a message and anchor text from a list, or at least provide different options for text and image anchor text.

 

[philiporchard]

To add a styled box "cleanly" you'd have to get them to also drop something into their css stylesheet. You can do it the dirty way by adding some code to the <p> tag directly, but most webmasters wouldn't want to do it I wouldn't have thought.

I wouldn't bother with the title part of the href. If anything it just makes links look more spammy than these days. Also, I would recommend using " and not ' in the link code.

If it was me though, I'd probably suggest using an image (with suitable alt text) rather than a direct text link. Not only is it cleaner and safer, you'll probably get more people adding the image with the link than you would the simple text. Websites tend to be far more accommodating for a small image at the bottom (some sort of crest which says they are part of the directory) than they would be a line of text with two hyperlinks in it.

Hi Peter,

Yes we do already use images (see below), but we probably need to include more text options, and also link to some internal 'sub cats'

http://www.bedford.co.uk/SuggestBusinessExpress.aspx

Thanks for helpful input