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A text link is a text hyperlink that typically links to another online document, such as a webpage, PDF file, video, Excel spreadsheet, etc. Text links can also point to another location on the same page.
The hyperlinks are typically underlined and highlighted in blue for unvisited links and purple for visited links. Internet users travel from one document to another by clicking on the links.
Here are some examples of the underlying HTML code for a text link:
<a href="index.html">homepage</a>
<a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>Search engines send out automated software programs called spiders (also known as crawlers or robots) to crawl the World Wide Web indexing retrieve webpages, documents, and other files to be used to create search indexes.
Text links are like the highways that search engine spiders travel along to find online documents. Text links help search engines better understand the topic of a link destination because spiders can index the link text (also known as Anchor Text) contained within text links. They are basically descriptive markers of what the linked document is about. In effect text links are like road signs.
In the Google Webmaster Guidelines guide, under the "Design and content guidelines" section, it suggests and I quote,
"Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link."
You can't get a clearer guideline than that.
So firstly, text links help search engine spiders find, crawl and index all the webpages in your website. After all, if search engines can't find your webpages, they won't show up in the search results.
And second, as I mentioned above, text links help search engines understand the topic of a link destination. Search engines spiders doesn't recognize text contained in images. Although there are ways to help spiders understand the content of image links (as explored in the Image Links guide), text links are the preferred method.
A link is the online equivalent of a "word of mouth" recommendation in the real world. Have you ever recommended a movie or a restaurant to someone you know? Why did you do that? Because the movie or restaurant was great and you wanted to share it with them, right?
Well, people "recommend" websites for the same reason you recommend a movie or restaurant. They do this by linking to the websites they like.
So the secret to getting people to link to your website is to create great content or web tools that other people like to share with their website visitors.
Link traffic is traffic generated by links to your website. So getting people to link to your website isn't just about improving search engine rankings. It also generates traffic.
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