What Can I Do With Links?

After finishing off several posts about creating various sorts of Tables of Contents, I received several comments and tMails concerning the creation of Links. Here's a quick hyperlink breakdown so you can make links work overtime for your blog.

When you write a link into your blog, you should always consider all the different pieces of code that make up a hyperlink. For example, here is the code for a link found on Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing:

All of that blather produces this link: INTRO: CARE TO REVISE YOUR STORY? (2.06.07)

The skeleton of any link looks like this:

First, substitute in your own link address, then substitute the name of your link for "Your Link". Very simple.

Now, there are several other pieces of the hyperlink that you should know:

1. Title: Your link title is exactly that: a formal title for your link. Search engines like Google will look through your code, pull out several details from your blog such as these formal link titles. The more accurate and explicit you are with your titles, the better chance you'll have of attracting readers to your blog.

2. Target: A link target is the location of the window where your link will open. Have you ever noticed that when you click a link, sometimes you leave the page you were reading, and sometimes your browser adds a new window--leaving you with the old page while opening a second? That's the work of your link's target. If you do not add any target information, your links will change the readers' browser window; if you add

3. You'll note that in Taboo Monkey Blue Blog's link code above, his address has a funny little "#" number sign inside his link:

The "#" sign takes the reader to an anchor. An anchor is like a bookmark that you can place at any location within your blog page. One way to make this work, is to drop an anchor in a post with this code:

Then, when you want to link your reader to the anchor, write your hyperlink like this:

Here's our hyperlink to an anchor we dropped near the top of our page: Anchor to Taboo.

Any questions?