Monday, May 07, 2007

Text surrounding links

Text surrounding links
By: Ryuichi Uchida

Ever since the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) invented and launched the internet, followed by the introduction of the more GUI (graphical user interface) based World Wide Web by the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), cyber space has become an invaluable part of society—responsible for many forms of communication and transaction from business, interests, personal relationships, societal interactions, and many more.

Of the many uses of cyber space, search engines the likes of Goodle, Yahoo!, MSN, among others, have been the most popular. These functions allow the user to find a range of web pages/sites in cyber space through key words that he/she inputs. Initially, search engines focused on web pages but have since introduced image searches, video, latest news and events, even shopping.

Users had instant access to hundreds, if not thousands, of relevant sites for whatever purpose. Of course, most of these sites are commercial in nature and businesses began trying to understand the system by which search engines ranks and lists sites so that their respective web pages would get more exposure, and hence, more business.

The initial understanding of most IT practitioners and web designers was that search engines relied heavily on “anchor texts”, or the primary link to a particular site. An example would be the anchor text Fruit Cast which may correspond to a search term of podcasting because of the shared text “cast.”

Recent studies of cyber space, however, have churned out drastically different results. Research has found out that anchor texts by themselves are not enough for a site to be listed high in the rankings of a search engine. In fact, it came as a shock to researchers when they noticed that actual texts in the web page surrounding or near the anchor text itself have more or less the same contribution to the overall listing of a search engine to a particular search term.

The challenge then was for a web page, especially its home page, to contain as many possible terms related to the nature of the business/organization, which users most regularly input in the search engine.

One technique that web designers now use is “embedding” or assigning certain texts to images, videos, slides, even themes, that appear in the web page—all in an effort for the site to sustain the maximum amount of web data to correspond to popular or common search terms inputted by users.

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