Anchor text plays a large role in search engine rankings. This is because it usually refers to the content of the page it is linking to and so the search engine takes notice.

Google’s own Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF) advises writing better anchor text and says:

The anchor text you use for a link should provide at least a basic idea of what the page linked to is about.

Internal links

You have full control over your internal links (links from inside your own site), so make sure they are always descriptive of their destination and maybe even include some of the keywords for that page.

External links

External (or incoming) links are links from other sites. It is even more important to get good anchor text on these, but you are not in control of them. Here are a few tips though to try and get good anchor text from external links:

1. If you are asking for a link from another site, let them know what you’d like the link text to be.
2. Give your pages meaningful and concise titles, people linking to other sites often use the page title.
3. If you find a link to your site that isn’t using great anchor text the send a polite email asking them to change it.

As you don’t have direct control over external anchor text it is actually more important to the search engines. This is because it tells the search engine what other people think your page is about, so you can’t fool it.

Click here

All too often click here is used as the anchor text for a link. Using click here doesn’t help anyone as it doesn’t describe what you are linking to, so it doesn’t help people quickly scanning links and it doesn’t help your search engine rankings.

To see the power of anchor text and click here try visiting your favourite search engine and putting in the search phrase “click here”.

You’ll probably find that the top 2 links are for Adobe reader and Adobe Flash. Now see if you can find any reference to “click here” on those pages.

The reason they rank so highly is the number of Web sites with links like click here to download Adobe Reader/Flash.

What are headings?

Headings on Web pages are defined by using heading tags, these range from H1 (the main heading) down to H6 (the least important heading). Most pages will only go as far as H2 or H3. Headings are usually displayed larger (and often more bold) than body text, but should not be used just for display purposes. Headings should be used to give your page structure, so the main page title would be H1 (or heading 1) and each sub-section of the page would be H2. If you then further break up content under the H2 section, you would use H3 and so on.

You can use headings to help you plan your page content by starting with the heading structure and then adding the detailed content under each heading. Don’t use too many headings though as this can stop the flow of your text.

Most content managers should include formatting options to add headings, often labelled Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc. If you don’t have these options then ask your Web designer about how you can use headings.

Making your content findable

People very rarely read the whole of your page from beginning to end. Usually they are looking for a specific piece of information. Headings are a great way to break up the content on your page and act as sign posts to help people find what they are looking for.

Search engine benefits

Search engines know that headings should give structure to your content and so they take more notice of them than the standard body text. Good headings not only act as good sign posts for readers but also provide the important key words and phrases to search engines.

Don’t overuse headings though as each heading dilutes the effect of the other headings.

What is a page title?

The page title is used in a number of places like:

• Search engine results pages,
• Browser window title bar,
• Default name of bookmarks and favourites

Too often you find sites which have a single title for every page (usually the site name), simple but meaningless titles like home or about, or worst of all untitled.

How important is a page title?

Some experts believe that it may be the single most important part of a page to Google (although no one really knows how Google works things out). However in the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide the first piece of advice is “Create unique, accurate page titles” and it later says:

Page titles are an important aspect of search engine optimization.

So this seems to confirm that Google certainly do value page titles.

How do I add/change my page title?

Using HTML

If you are using html then your page title should look something like this:

<title>Miniature Sculptures by Miniaturist Penny Thomson</title>

It will be between the <head> and </head> tags.

Using software (like Dreamweaver or FrontPage) on your computer

At the top of the screen usually near the tool bar should be a box labeled name or title. This is where you type your page title.

If you use an online editor or Content Management System (CMS)

Whatever name you give your page when creating or saving it is usually used as the title.

What makes a good page title?

Now you know what a page title is, how important it is and how to change it. Let’s look at what makes a good page title, here are a few guidelines:

• Accurately describe the content of the page
• Each page should have a unique title
• Be brief but descriptive
• Use key words or phrases you’ve identified for your page
• Start with the most relevant words

It’s worth mentioning that you might want to include your site name in all your page titles. This is not a problem, it helps people know they are still on your site (although it does make the title longer than it needs to be). Keep your site name to the end of the title though e.g. Design process (TwoLittleFishes Web Design) instead of TwoLittleFishes Web Design Process. This keeps your unique and keyword heavy text at the beginning of the title.

Bad page titles are often single generic words, good page titles give an accurate description of the page using key words and phrases.

That is just a few examples, please leave any suggestions of good and bad page titles in the comments.

For some more advice see Writing useful page titles on 456 Berea Street.

Bite size chunks

Using lists can help break up content into chunks that are easier to understand and remember. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen shows that using lists can improve readability by 47%.

Using lists helps to highlight important information and so helps people complete tasks more quickly and accurately.

Creating readable lists

Start a list with a leading sentence fragment that each of the items in the list complete.

e.g.

Some of the ways to make your Web site more readable are using:

• highlighted key words and phrases,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• concise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• inverted pyramid style.

Make sure the first words in each list item are important information carrying words. Try not to include duplicate words at the beginning of multiple lines or begin lines with filler words like “an” or “a”.

It may be worth writing all of the list items you want first and then write the leading sentence to include those items without filler text. You’ll probably then need to change the list items too to make sense.

Don’t overuse lists though, if your page is filled of lists that each have only 2 items you’ve probably taken it too far.

Numbered steps

Numbered steps are a great way of providing instructions. It’s easy to keep track of where you are with numbered steps to carry out a task like baking a cake or finding a pub.

Try to break the steps down into individual smaller tasks that are easy to do.

This might be a good way of making a task that seems difficult into a more manageable one.

Why is highlighting key words and phrases important?

When people are trying to find information on a Web site, they usually scan the text looking for key words or phrases.

These key words and phrases either act as sign posts to a larger piece of information or can be important pieces of information themselves.

How to highlight key words and phrases (and how not to)

There are a number of ways to highlight text, some of the ways that you might highlight text in other places should not be used on Web sites.

Do highlight key words and phrases by using:

• bold text (this is sometimes called strong emphasis);
• numerals (e.g. 5) instead of words (e.g. five) for factual information (numbers help the text stand out among words);
• colour (but don’t use blue, see below for the reason why).

Italic text is often also used, however it can be harder to read. If you want to use it then I’d suggest no more than 2 words of italic text.

Don’t highlight key words and phrases by using:

• ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (using all capital letters is considered shouting and seen as rude);
• underlined text (underlining usually means that the text is a link);
• blue text (again blue text usually means that the text is a link).

Capital letters are not only considered shouting and seen as rude, capital letters are more difficult to read. When text is all in capital letters it takes people longer to read because the letter shapes are less distinct than lower case letters.

In fact people often ignore text in capitals altogether as Susannah Ross says in her book “Writing for the Web“:

The irony is that in text where writers put important information in capitals precisely to draw our attention to it, we tend to skip it.

Don’t highlight too many key words and phrases otherwise nothing stands out. Only highlight words and phrases that help people find the right part of the page to get the information they are looking for or important pieces of information.

Web sites are read in a very different way to either books or reports. The biggest difference is that with books and reports you usually start at the beginning and read all the words on a page until you reach the end. When you first visit a Web site you are often somewhere in the middle and very rarely do we read all the words.

Actually a Web site is read more like a magazine or newspaper than a book or report. But as we’ll see further on, Web sites are still very different from a magazine or newspaper.

How people read Web sites

Most of the time when visiting a Web site we are trying to find some information, like how much it’s going to cost to post the book we’ve just sold on Amazon. This is where Web sites start to become different from a magazine, where we read articles because they are interesting. Some Web sites actually contain articles too, but here we are talking about general Web sites.

As people are looking for information, they just scan through the text until they find a pointer (a word or phrase) to the information. So most of the words you write about your product, feature or service never get read as people are just looking for key words or phrases.

Writing Web site content for the way people read it

Now that we know how people read Web sites we can start to make sure the way we write helps people to find what they are looking for. Some of the ways we can do this are by:

• highlighting key words and phrases,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• concise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• an inverted pyramid