What can links do for me and what types are there?

We all spend our day on this thing called the Internet or World Wide Web, call it what you like. It hasn't been around that long, but now there is no way we can live with out it. Why is it so special?

In simple terms, it connects myriads of smaller networks together so they can all talk to one another and get information from one another. Every page of information out there has a unique address which means you can look it up any time from anywhere. This also opens another possibly for us. Linking!

The two main types of link I will look at are: Internal Links and External Links.

External Links

If you own a website and are building pages or posts to grow that website, you may sometimes wish to offer your site visitors some additional information on the topic they are reading. If the topic is not covered on your own website but you still want to offer the reader a holistic experience, you may create an External Link to a webpage on another website.

This should be used carefully. First ensure that any target external site is reputable and be confident that it will be there for as long as you need it. It would harm your sites' SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ranking if the target site closed down, leaving you with a broken link.

Search engines tend to like an external link or two on your website, as it shows them that you are trying to offer a holistic approach to your subject rather than jealously keeping them on your own site only.

That being said, don't send your visitors off to a website that might steal them away from yours, so use your discretion here.

The other thing I always ensure that I do with external links is to make sure the external page opens up in another tab of the browser. You don't want them to close your page and go on to the new one. Chances are they will forget to come back, or if they close the external page yours will go along with it. Relegated to history.

So, how do we make sure the external link opens the site in a new tab?

We're lucky because we are using WordPress and most of the hard coding stuff is done for us, what a lucky bunch we are.

So when you are creating your link in the Visual Editor, high light the text you want to create the link from, and press the link tool bar button.

It's ok, mine didn't have a red square round it either.

Ok, so once the dialogue box for creating your link is open you can paste the address you want to link to in the box the says URL. The link text that is shown is the text on your site that the link will be attached to.

Directly below that is the box that will allow you to choose to make a new tab open in the viewers browser.

Ok, let's move onto internal links.