Linking makes the Web go round

The World Wide Web is navigated through a series of links. I remember the good ‘ole days of the Internet when “surfing the Web” meant hitting the “Next” button in Mozilla until you hit the end of the Internet. Yes, there was an end.

Today, search engines “crawl” the Web following links and “calculating” the value of your content in the grand scheme of the Web.

For search engines like Google and Yahoo, your Web pages are ranked by complex computer algorithms. This is why search engine optimization is a very important part of your digital education. After all, you want people to find your content, right?

So, if linking is what makes the Web go round, then linking should be a major component of your online stories.

This is a direct order!

There are two types of links: internal and external.

Internal links refer to content within your Web site’s domain.

External links refer to content outside your domain.

Which links do you think carry more “weight” in Google’s algorithms? Yes, that’s right, external links. So don’t be afraid to link to content outside your site.

But here are some tips:

• Be sure the site you’re linking to is credible.
• If you don’t know who posted the content, then you’re probably better off not linking to them.
• Be sure to always double-check your links, there is no bigger turn-off to online news consumers than broken links.

Now, to the fun stuff!

HTML uses tags to mark the start and end of the text that is the clickable link. Therefore, the a href=” tag must be closed with after your link text. Remember, start tag < >, end tag .

You will use three different attributes to create your link. The three attributes that should be included in every link you create are:

1.href=""

The text in between the href quotes is the URL of the page you are linking to. This is the Web page your browser will take you to when you click on the link.

The text in between < and > is the text that will show up on your Web page as the clickable link text.

2. title=""

The text in between the title quotes will pop up when a user scrolls over your link. If you scroll over the Francis Lewis in Fresh Meadows, Queens link above you will see the title text more on the museum building.

The following code…

At <a href=”http://www.francislewishs.org/home.aspx” title=”Queens School Is Successful, and Crowded, NYTimes.com”> Francis Lewis in Fresh Meadows, Queens </a>, which has nearly twice as many students as the 2,400 it was designed for, administrators have been forced to look for every possible nook of space and cranny of time to cram in more bodies.

…will format your text like this…

At Francis Lewis in Fresh Meadows, Queens, which has nearly twice as many students as the 2,400 it was designed for, administrators have been forced to look for every possible nook of space and cranny of time to cram in more bodies.

Of course, most content management systems use WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools that let you simply highlight text and click a button to create your inline hyperlinks. But what fun is that? If you’re CMS allows it, you should look under the hood, so to speak, and do a little hand coding to add title attributes. In WordPress you can use the “link” button to create the link then click on HTML and edit the code to add the title attribute. Give it a try!

WRONG: this article is an example.

RIGHT: this story, Prepaid College Savings Plans Might Not Cover All Costs, from The New York Times is an example.

RIGHT: this story by Sean Hammil, Prepaid College Savings Plans Might Not Cover All Costs, from The New York Times is an example.

Special thanks to Chris Brewer for his nifty “Display HTML sample code” utility.