Links

Submitted by pwadmin on

The "big thing" that make web pages so unique and popular is that they can contain links to other pages, files, images, etc.

Web addresses

Web addresses are the industry-standard way used to uniquely identify a web page. Web addresses have three parts:

  1. they start with "http://" or "https://",
  2. they have a unique website identifier (called a domain name) in the middle (e.g.: "peaceworks.ca"), and
  3. they end with the address of a page on that website (e.g.: "/content/development-services").

The technical name for a web address is a URL (which stands for Universal Resource Locator).

Search engines and the importance of choosing good link text

You're probably already familiar with this, but you usually have to click on some words (called the link text) to activate a link.

The world's biggest search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo!, all use link text as one of the primary factors in determining how high to show your site in their search results. They work on the assumption that the link text describes what the web page or file on the other end is about.

One very popular phrase to use for link text is "click here". This is very poor link text, because it does not describe what is being linked to. We recommend avoiding "click here" when you can, in favour of alternatives like:

  • "See our news and events page for more weekly specials" (instead of "click here for more weekly specials")
  • "Download our April Newsletter." (instead of "click here to download our April Newsletter")
  • "Read our privacy policy. (instead of "click here to read our privacy policy")
  • "Interested in volunteering?" (instead of "click here to learn about volunteering")

(where the bold text is the most-ideal link text)

Link Types

There are four types of links:

  • external links, which go from a page on your website to a page on another website,
  • internal links, which go from one page on your website to another page on your website,
  • download links, which go from one page on your website to a file, like a PDF or Word document, and,
  • anchor links, which go from one part of a page to another (an advanced concept that you might not need to worry about)