Ask Dave Taylor: Tech and Business

Saturday

SEO Secret: Text Links are Better than Graphic Links

Dave, the sites that are linking back to me are using a graphical "badge" rather than a textual link. This is a graphics link back, which according to your Google book, doesn't rank as highly as a text link. Yet, my audience loves these. Now what?

Glad you're finding useful information in my Google book. You ask about something that a lot of people are surprised to hear about but is actually quite important in terms of your overall findability, so let me explain it in detail.

There are essentially two different ways that a Web page can point to another Web page, either with a text link, where one or more words are 'clickable' and whisk you to another site, or with a graphical element, where a picture, figure, illustration or other graphical device is 'clickable' and takes you to the new page.

Why is text better, though? Because when you use a graphic, you lose the powerful value of...