"How to create links in your post and why they should be anchored"

As promised on the last post here we will learn to add a link and also learn about why it should be an anchor link...and what exactly an anchor link is.

Let's start with creating a link within your post, the easy way.

As you can see from the picture above I have shown a real link and you can see this link on the last post regarding how to add an image to your post.

You see what I also did there?

I created an anchor link, which I will explain shortly but first let's get the linking method itself out of the way so you then know how it's done.

Choose the words you wish to create a link with, do this by simply highlighting the chosen words, in the above case (as in the image) I chose "Google account" which you can see to the left of the blue pop up box in the image, then I clicked "link" on the top of the editor as you can see right above the left top corner of the blue  box, the link used is for gmail.com as you can see.

(Note : you can change the chosen words "Google account" in the actual blue pop up box if you needed to)

This is very simple to do and you should use links where you can, where it's relevant.
As you add your link, you can easily test it using the little "test link" link and know if you have done this correctly.

Now let's move onto why you should use anchor links and what they are.

In the anchor link example above and below the image, I linked to the post previous to this one, I also used the very words the post was about, this is an anchor link, the words used matter.

A bad anchor link would say something like "click here" which tells the search engines like Google nothing of what the link goes to, using the words of the post itself as I have done shows them exactly what it's about.

This does matter, it means links gain "weight" with the search engines for the words used within that link.

This may seem confusing at first but it's really straightforward and makes sense once you see it more often on the websites you use, read.

For example having a link to a dog training site using words like "horse" for the link would be silly and irrelevant to the content beyond that link. Much better to have it say... "dog training"?

Therefore if possible always use the words that are relevant to the linked content itself, they matter, they are your anchored links.

I do hope that makes sense and you now know not only how to create the link but also how to format it for best effect.

Any questions?