by Beginning Internet Marketing Team
28. September 2009 16:19
One of the things that frustrate Internet searchers immensely is being directed to a page which doesn't seam to have any relevance to the actual search they did.
In some cases the cause can be that the web page has changed but the search engine hasn't been updated yet. Spam used to be a big cause also, but search engines are becoming much wiser to pages that just throw in keywords without any real relevance. However the main cause is that the relevant content is just low down in the page.
As we know, people are impatient and only a couple of people in a hundred will take the time to hunt down the information they want. So Googles release of deep links will mean that a searcher will be taken not only to the relevant page but also to the relevant part of the page.
So, how do website editors actually support the new feature?
Well GoogleTM is implementing the functionality through named anchors. A named anchor has the structure of; <a name="keyword_here" /> What Google will do is generate a link as a standard website address (URL) and append a hash instruction to the end e.g http://mysite.com/mypage.html#keyword_here. The users browser will then automatically scroll to the position of the named anchor.
So a few tips are;
- To ensure that you include a named anchor next to each heading in your web pages.
- Also consider adding named anchors to sections of your web pages which have clear and concise messages.
- Name your anchors differently and uniquely throughout your page.
- Although its not vital, try to use keyword rich names, but do not use spaces or any other characters other than hyphens and underscores.
- Finally, try to include a table of contents ate the top of your page. The links in the table of contents should link directly to the named anchors.
