what is the correct way to code incoming links for SEO?

Question

our site is giving out 'badges' to our authors. they can post these on their personal blogs and they will serve as incoming links to our site.

We want to give out the best possible code for SEO without doing anything that would get us flagged.

i would like to know what you're thoughts are on the following snippet of code and if anyone has any DEFINITE advice on dos and donts with it. Also, let me know if any of it is redundant or not worth it for SEO purposes.

i've kept the css inline since some of the writers would not have access to add link to external css

i've changed the real values, but title, alt etc would be descriptive keywords similar to our page titles etc (no overloading keywords or any of that)

<div id="writer" style="width:100px;height:50px;>
<h1><strong style="float:left;text-indent:-9999px;overflow:hidden;margin:0;padding:0;">articles on x,y,z</strong>
    <a href="http://www.site.com/link-to-author" title="site description">
        <img style="border:none" src="http://www.site.com/images/badge.png" alt="description of articles" title="View my published work on site.com"/>
    </a>
</h1></div>

thanks

Answer 1

I don't think there is any issue with this code except your <h1> tag. I would probably change it to <h2> simply because pages are supposed to have only 1 <h1> tag per page.

You could also use an iFrame instead if you wanted. That is what SO does but I know you will not get as much linky goodness.