How To Add Hyperlinks Into Your Posts And Pages.

This short tutorial will show you how I link to another web page using the WYSIWYG editor in Wordpress.

WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get.

Lets say I was writing a post about why you should follow me on twitter, The most logical thing for me to do is to link directly to my twitter page right from the post you are reading, this way you can easily start following me on twitter.

Obviously the first step is to write some text about My Twitter Activity, then using my cursor I would Highlight The Text I wanted as my link.

Tip; The text you highlight should be relevant to the the web page or post you are linking to.

Now I have to get the correct URL for the web page I want to link to, to do this I usually open a new browser window or tab and go to the specific web page I wanted to link to from my Post or Page.

Once my web page has loaded into the browser, I go to the address bar and copy the entire link, including the “http:// “.

Most browsers will automatically highlight the URL when you Click inside of the address bar, I simply copy the highlighted URL.

For the next step, I go back to the post or page I am writing and in the tool bar above my post there is a small icon that looks like a “Chain” link, this icon only becomes visible and active when the text I want as my link has been highlighted with my Cursor, otherwise this icon wil be faded and inactive, this is what I Click on to create my link.

After Clicking on the Link icon, a small popup window will appear, this window is where you Insert/edit your links.

Across the top of the Insert/edit links screen you have four tabs General, Popup, Events, Advanced,

The General tab is the only one I use when adding Hyperlinks within my posts.

You will also notice in the General tab screen, there are five text boxes to fill out, I only use the Link URL, Target and the Title option when linking to another web page.

After my Insert/edit link window has opened the first thing I do is paste the link I copied from my Twitter home page into the Link URL text area.

The next step is to decide if I want my link to open in the same window as my web page or force the link to open the webpage in a new window or tab.

If you want the link to open in the same window, leave the Target setting As Is, if you want your link to open in a New window or tab Click on the drop down menu and choose the _blank option.

After doing some research on the topic of forcing links to open in a new window, I would suggest you think about your decision to open links in a new window, this is a fairly contentious issue among internet users, you can read my post on the topic here.

The last thing I do is give my link a title, this is what you see when you hover your cursor over a link on a live web page. Otherwise known as a tooltip.

After I have filled in all of the appropriate fields I Click on the Insert button in the bottom left hand corner..

The Insert/edit link window should close and you will now see your link Highlighted and underlined, your link will become active or Clickable when you publish your post to the web.