So now we are going to create a link in WordPress, we will start with creating an external and internal links first

So firstly, why would you want to create an external link on your blog, because you may be thinking, I don't want people to click away from my site and leave, so why would I want to create an external link in the first place

Well external links are good for SEO, here is an example is this

Lets say you are explaining something on a page of content and you want to also link to, lets say to Wikipedia for the meaning of a certain word, Google likes to see this because you are giving value to the reader and also you are linking to an authority site like Wikipedia.

Have you ever wondered why Wikipedia ranks so well all over the internet, you need look no further than the links it provides to the reader, which lead you to more pages within the site and giving value to the reader as each links goes to more content.

Links really do play a very important role in SEO as they create your site structure and site structure is very important for SEO, additionally it provides navigation for your your site, which Google also thinks is a high priority.

I hope by now you are beginning to see the importance of links and the role they will play in your marketing efforts and SEO strategy.

It is also necessary to create theses links in a certain way, so when the web spiders see these links they do not follow them and leave your site, they just see them, but do not follow them away from your blog.

So how do we create a link to an external source but make sure the reader does not leave your site and the web spiders see them but do not follow them, so lets begin to construct our link

In order to show you this, I am going to do a real life example of creating a link in one of my blogs about infertility, called ovulation after miscarriage, this is done in two stages.

Stage 1 of creating an external link

Below is a sample of text and I want to create an external link for a certain word to be better explained by linking it to Wikipedia

What I am going to be doing is linking to Wikipedia for the term "luteinising hormone"

Step 1 = Put the term into Google and get the relevant Wikipedia page and then get the URL of that page which is as follows

We now have the URL we wish to link to, so the next step is as follows

Step 2 = Highlight the term that you wish to create a link from and this term will become the anchor text of the link, which means once it has been created the term will turn a blue colour and will be clickable.

Once you have highlighted it, go to the link button in your tools and you will see it is a picture of a link, the one next to it is the un-link button, click the link button and then this dialog box will appear

Paste the URL into the field that says URL and also check the box that says Open link in new tab and then click update, once you have done this, update your page and the link will be created in the background or text view of the page and this is what it look like

Now you can see the link code, the first part of the code is the URL and the second part of the code you will see something called target = blank, this is called a target attribute, its the bit of the code that defines where and how you view the URL page that you have linked to.

Its an attribute, so it defines any extra information about the element, this code is generated automatically because you checked the box in the link window called,

Open link in new window/tab

so when the link is clicked the reader will not leave your site.

The new URL will open in the same browser window so the URL will be opened in a new tab but your site will still be visible to them so they do not actually leave your blog, they can read the content and have you blog open at the same time

Here is a list of target attributes for HTML

Ok, now that we have created our link and we have also made sure that the new page does not open in a different browser but opens up in the same browser window as our website, so visitors will not leave our site.

The next step is to make the link a no follow link and to do that we will need another attribute called the "no follow" attribute

So let us remind our selves what our link looks like so far

So here it is, we have the tags and we have the URL as well as the attribute target = blank and of course the anchor text which is "luteinising hormone"

So our link so far has four parts

1. Tags

2. href attribute - Specify's the URL

3. The target attribute specifies where to open the linked document.

4. anchor text

Stage 2 - Making the link into a no follow link

So now we move to stage 2 ,to do this we need to use the "rel attribute". The rel attribute specifies the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

Only used if the "href" attribute is present.

The syntax of rel, is value so the rel defines values - here is a list of values that go with the rel attribute

We are going to use the value called "no follow" and add this extra code to our link to make it a no follow link, to do this you need to go into text view of your page and manually add the no follow code, just like the one in the example below

Here is what the finished link looks like

So here is the finished item as you can see we have added the new section of the code rel="no follow" Don't forget the speech marks

The breakdown of the link is as follows

1. Tags

2. href attribute - Specify s the URL

3. The target attribute specifies where to open the linked document.

4. The rel attribute = no follow and it specifies the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

5. anchor text

So now we have created a link that can be used for external linking, to create a internal link its the same but you do not need the target = blank and you can choose to make the link no follow if you want.

The purpose of no follow, is to be able to control the web spiders on your page and only send them where you want then to go, so if you do not want then to follow your link then you can add the no follow attribute like I have shown you.

Internal links

Internal links are very important to Google and SEO, you only have to look at a site like Wikipedia to see how internal links can really boost your ranking.

Google sees internal links as a way of improving end user experience, as you can link to relevant pages from a page of content that the reader may be interested in, if you go to Wikipedia you will see many internal links leading to relevant on topic content.

Here is an example of an external link on one of my sites

The next picture is the text view of the link

You can see the HTML code of the link this link was created using the link button in the WordPress editor, you can see that the anchor text which is - "calculate my ovulation date", is exactly the same as the title of the page, its important to do this as the Google spider sees the anchor text of the link and it sees a link going to a relevant page from a page about ovulation

So the page is about ovulation and a relevant topic to ovulation is - calculate my ovulation so Google sees that I am covering the whole topic of ovulation and Google prefers topic pages rather than keyword stuffed pages.

It wants to see the topic covered not just an article on one keyword, if want you to you can have other relevant pages linked to the topic page

To know what relevant keywords to use for your pages the best way to do this is to use LSI Keywords when you do your keyword research

That's the end of the lesson on internal and external links, I hope you found it valuable, in the nest lesson we are going to look atLSI Keywords and how to use them to structure your site.