Hypertext

Hypertext is the word or words that are in a link and if clicked on will take you somewhere.

I say somewhere as a link can take you to another part of the same document and in that case is called an Anchor Text link.

Yet in general the majority of links will take you to another document, be it on the same domain or website or to a different website or domain altogether. This will be the type we will be looking at.

If you have a look at any address on the internet it will start with http://

The http stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

As the story goes, Engineers complained about having to go through pages and pages of digital documents when looking for something in large documents or manuals. So the Programmers invented links that when clicked on would take anyone to the relevant part of the document being referenced, to make the new feature even more practical they allowed you to use words in the actual link.

These words when inserted in links were then called Hyper Text and the process that allowed you to do this in the background was called Transfer Protocol. So when you click on a link that has words in it that takes you somewhere else, you are using Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

While knowing the inception of the technology is not important, understanding what it means can have a dramatic affect on your understanding when it comes to why a link has power and how Search Engines use links when sorting out billions of pages on the internet.

Going back to why a link was invented and why Hypertext was developed will shed a lot of light on this subject. The purpose was to make navigating a large document as painless as clicking on a link and by having the ability to place the term in the link that the destination content would be about made it that much more user friendly for the person looking for information on a specific topic.

The same principle applies today.

The more accurate the Hypertext is to the destination pages content the higher a Search Engine will grade that link as being relevant to the destination pages content.

A link carries a certain amount of power in it, as it is a reference. The more accurate the Hypertext or Anchor Text, as it is also know, used in the link to the destination pages content the more reputation for that term will be passed onto the destination page.

The Power that the link carries is the term used in the Link or Anchor Text

So a link saying Camels would pass reputation that the destination page is about Camels. Same as a link saying Frogs would pass power or reputation to the destination page for the term Frogs and help it to rank higher for the term frogs in the Organic Search results.

A typical hypertext link may look like this Links on the suface yet in the back end it looks like this

<A href="http://www.lostinhyperspace.com/Need-Links.html">Links</A>

The word Links being the Hypertext or Anchor text in the above link.

Once a page has the most reputation for a term it is ranked #1 in the Search Results for that term.

To see this in a real life scenario have a look at the results for click here.

If you have a look at the top result you will see the term click here is no where to be seen on the page content  for the top 2 results so how did that happen? Those results are purely a result of the Hypertext in the millions of links pointing at that page. So the next time someone tells you do not need links, you will know they have no idea what they are talking about.

It is true that if you have lots of good info and keep your content tight as far as what it is covering you can rank in the Search Engines with NO links, yet the reality is that no one else is trying to rank for that term or terms and in general no one is looking for that information either.

So while it may be easy to rank for say, Red spotted zebra without links there is no point to it, unless you actually have a red spotted zebra. Just as a parting point if you did have a red spotted zebra it would not be long before everyone was looking for it.

So I need links