How to do search engine (and user) friendly links.

We’re all familiar with links online (or we wouldn’t get very far online 🙂 ).

They can look different though – so I could link to Lisa’s blog by just having http://www.renegadeparent.net/ in there, or I could make it more friendly by using something like Renegade Parent – for leaders not followers which tells you (and the search engines) something about the site I’m linking to.

So the second way of doing it is better for all concerned (although obviously it can be misleading, and you still need to be careful what links you follow!).

So how do you do that then?

Well, on a number of blog platforms there are tools provided, so if you’re on your blog, you need to do some exploring. Here in a wordpress world I’ve got a blue button labelled “link” – I select the text I want to use as my link text, press the link button, then paste in the destination.

Over on blogger I know there’s something very similar, although it has a picture on it rather than a word, sort of a globe with a little chain link above it. It works in much the same way though.

Or maybe, you’d like to know how to do it by hand? From scratch? It’s fairly straightforward actually, you can handcode the html without too much pain. You need something that looks like this:

<a href=”http://renegadeparent.net”>Renegade parent – for leaders, not followers</a href>

Hope that helps someone, somewhere 🙂 Happy to answer questions in comments if anyone needs any more help!

If you’re wondering why you might want to use search engine friendly links, I wrote a post a little while ago about just that topic, titled positive publicity for home education posts.