“Webmasters. Listen. Please!” by tech tips blog gHacks.net requests that bloggers using the site as a resource construct search engine-friendly hyperlinks in their citations.

Search engines such as Google currently use inbound links as a factor in measuring a site’s relevance and authority. The exact formula is of course a trade secret, but it is widely believed that a link’s anchor text has a significant amount of weight — linking to a site using specific keywords such as “how to construct links in a blog post” is much more beneficial than using generic phrases such as “via” or “click here”.

I usually put my own spin on the structure of a blog post (of which this post is an example). I find it easy to construct my posts in the same way that I learned to write essays in school — I will lead with ‘“[Title of Source Web Page]” by [author]…’ and then dive into rest of the post. This approach has the dual benefit of being a properly structured piece of writing that is search engine-friendly.

I suppose what this all comes down to is writing blog posts in a manner that is easily understood by your readers. Linking meaningless phrases such as “click here’ is a waste of space, but using relevant keywords in your anchor text is always sure to let the visitor know exactly what is waiting on the other end of that link. And as the search engines tell us, they strive to reward sites that put their visitors first.