What are Links?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Links and Hyperlinks

Links are special bits of text or images that appear in a browser or in an email. When they are clicked, the viewer is taken to a new web page. This new web page can be on a new website.

Links used to be called hyperlinks but as the internet has evolved the word links is used as a short hand. They underpin the whole process of navigation on the internet and so are extremley important to understand.

Underlying all links is some HTML code that does two things. First it controls what the link looks like. This can be in terms of color, size, font or which image is displayed.

Secondly, it controls where the reader goes when they click the link.

If we look at the raw HTML of a link we can see the various components.

<a href="http://www.insidertactics.com/conversion.php " title="Read more about Conversion in the Internet Marketing Dictionary" style="color: #000080">conversion</a>

This is all just a single link and it looks confusing. Let's look at each part in turn. I've colour-coded them for ease of identification.

• The part beginning "<a href=" tells the browser or email reader that what follows is a link.
   
• The part shown in black is the URL of the web page that the link takes the reader to.
   
• The "title" section shows what words are displayed in some browsers when the cursor is placed over the link. These words essentially pop up and disappear again if the cursor is moved. You can see this demonstrated by hovering your cursor over this phrase.
   
• The "style" section sets the colour of the link. In this case "#000080" means no red, no green and quite a lot of blue.
   
• The word "conversion" is the word that appears as a link. This is also the bit that gets shown in blue on the screen.
   
• The final part </a> tells the browser or email reader that it is the end of the link. 

If we place that link on this page it looks like this.

conversion

Placing your cursor over that link will probably show the words "Read more about conversion in the Internet Marketing Dictionary". However, whether or not this works depends on which browser you are using to read this page.