Anchor Links

Anchor links are an effective way to drive traffic to your website or to internal web pages by linking to them in your content. They’re usually referred to as a “link” or a “hyperlink”.

In many word processing programs, like MS Word, you can simply highlight the text you want to use to create the link and then click on the link icon in your toolbar. Once that pops up, you simply type or search for the appropriate page you want to link to and you’re good to go. If you convert that document into a PDF you’ll have to take extra measures or use the Adobe products themselves to retain the links but it’s fairly straightforward.

And many website development programs and interfaces give you the same look and feel. Joomla for example has a user interface that let’s you type and link in much the same manner you would as creating a Word document and WordPress works in much the same manner.

However, if you’re creating your links in a text document or using HTML to write your content and coding then you’ll need to know a few things.

First things first, by default,all links will appear as follows in all browsers:

* An unvisited link is underlined and blue
* A visited link is underlined and purple
* An active link is underlined and red

Understand the basics of HTML. In order to write your own anchor links you’ll need to know some basic html.

Here’s an example of what an anchor link would look like and what the various codes mean:

* The <a> tag defines an anchor and </a> closes the anchor
* href      URL      Specifies the destination of a link

So the following sentence which would appear to your readers as this:

If you’re new to the site click here for a brief site introduction.

Will look like this in your code

If you’re <a href=”http://www.websitelinkhere”>new to the site click here</a> for a brief site introduction.

It’s pretty straight forward and easy to accomplish whether you’re doing the coding yourself or using a WSYWYG, what you see is what you get, type interface. Regardless, anchor links are a great way to link to specific pages in your content without detracting from the copy. And it has been proven that people commonly skip over banner ads but they’ll often click on the hyperlink in your content so it will result in more traffic going to chosen web pages.