Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

Why are text links 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?

Dave's Answer:

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 the words that people use to link to you .

Let me show you an example: If I link to my new site ConnectSafely.com as a domain name, as I just did, then if someone searches for the domain name, the destination page is considered more relevant. Not particularly useful because if they're searching for a domain name, they probably already know my site.

If I link to the site using a keyword or key phrase that someone might search for, however, like this: wireless security ebook then I'm taking a big step towards improving my findability for that particular phrase.

If you offer a graphical link like a badge, you get the benefit of the inbound link, but even the alt text on the graphic or the graphic filename still carry less weight in the relevance algorithm than a simple text link does. Hence my preference for people linking to my site with text, not graphical, links.

There is a possible middle ground, however, where you might offer a snippet of HTML to cut and paste that includes both a graphic and a small text link below it. That'd be the best of both worlds!

Hope that helps you out!

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Comments

Dave I disagree with you on this one. I've been involved in ads and promotions for over 10 years on the Internet, and it is a well known proven fact that graphic banner ads out perform text links to an incredibible margin! The CTR is much higher on banner ads verses text links! Nothing beats banner ads for imediate referral traffic.

Now there are benefits to text links, but none of the benefits has any thing to do with CTR or imediate traffic. The benefit of text links is for SEO, off page optimization. Getting more targeted anchor Back Links, which will improve your PageRank and SERPS. But will do little to bring any imediate traffic.

Here is what I suggest to clients. USE BOTH! Use text links for SEO, and banners for advertisements. If possible, you can use both together. Have a banner ad with clickable text underneith the banner! You will see the benefit of extra traffic banner ads bring in, and also benefit from seo of text links. You should target banner ads on related web sites, avoid banner farms, your ad should appear on the first half of the page for best results, but do not be affraid to buy ad space on the bottom of the page if the price is right. When shopping for ad space for banners, the PR on the site means very little (unlike text links). For banner ads we are going after the traffic, not the PR. High PR does not always mean tons of traffic, in fact you can have a low PR and still see tons of traffic! So you want to determind how much traffic the site gets before you buy your ad space. I would ask for direct access to their stats page.

Until next time!
Bud

Posted by: SEO Traffic Rank at October 10, 2005 1:24 AM

Dave how to determine the percentage difference between graphic link and text link? Doesn't matter if I link to my website by graphic from another website? wount that bring me value in google? Just wonder where is possible to read about these things?

Posted by: Webmaster at December 5, 2005 7:40 PM

I don't know if there's a quantifiable percentile difference, especially with the ever-secretive Google, but I think that in general both types of links are going to give you "inbound link goodness" from the Google algorithm. The big difference in my eyes is that with a graphic you can't reinforce the keywords through the inbound link "hot" text.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at December 5, 2005 10:20 PM

I have a lot to say, but ...

I have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but most of all I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a chai!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!