Adding links through HTML is pretty straightforward. It is the simplest, useful HTML ‘coding’ out there.
To link specific text you use an anchor tag. These look like ‘<a>’, but also must include a couple specific parameters defined in it. To tell it what URL or web address to send the link to, you must define a parameter inside the ancor tag called ‘href’. For example, linking to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>’.
That is how you link something, but how do you make text appear? This is simple. To make text appear you must place what text you want after the anchor tag. After the text you must then include a ‘</a>’ in order to indicate the end of the link. For example, a full link to this website would look like
‘<a href=”http://gpmwebsolutions.com”>Great Web Solutions</a>’. This would display the words ‘Great Web Solutions’ and link to the address indicated in the ‘href’ parameter.
Here is a link to w3schools information about making anchor tags/links: W3Schools anchor tag information. Other useful parameters to define in the anchor tag are listed on that site. Below are the ones I find the most important.
- ‘target’ – This tells the link where to open. Defining this to ‘target=”blank”‘ tells the link to open in a new window. This keeps people on your site still if you are linking to another site.
- ‘rel’ – This is useful for telling search engines not to leave your site while crawling. If you define it to ‘rel=”nofollow”‘, then it will tell the search engine crawling bots to not leave your site when finding a link. This is important for helping your page rank. At the same time, when getting people to link to your site, it is important to make sure they don’t define this attribute (when doing a link exchange).
