External and internal links direct your readers to stories themselves, previous or other stories on topics, or to other information. Follow these guidelines for the anchor text (the clickable text in your hyperlink) and other linking issues:
1. Include only essential links in articles. Links can go bad over time. Also, if you have a forest of links in your writing, it can become difficult to know what to click on — what may be behind a link, or why it’s even there. And they take the reader away from your story. You don’t want this.
2. The link text should let users know what they’ll find if they click. Options include nouns with some descriptive information (“2014 Yale study”), a person and an active verb (“Micah Sifry wrote”) or an interesting statistic (“97% of social scientists”).
If you are making headlines into links, same rules for headlines apply. How does a baseball fan know there’s an article worth considering behind the words “Fun in Arizona’s sun.” Smaller also challenges us to be less cute and more functional.
3. Conciseness. Good links are usually 2-5 words. And don’t waste words with things like “Click here to find out more …”
4. Avoid stacking links tightly in a sentence — for example, “Three new studies provide a research perspective on concussions in sports.”
5. Link to primary sources whenever possible, unless the secondary source is central to your coverage. For example, if you’re writing about a new U.N. report, link directly to it.
6. Internal links (any link from one page on your website to another page on your website) are key to SEO. Add to articles to help readers develop a deeper understanding of a specific topic. Aim to be as descriptive in your anchor text as possible. This help Google understand the page it’s linking to.
COM252: Writing for the Mass Media 