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Internal Links: How to Link Your Web Pages Together

Hyperlinks are the way we get around on the web, and these little rascals come in two flavors. There are internal links that link your own web pages and files together, and external links which link your pages to other web sites. This page covers Internal Links. If you wanted to learn how to use External Links, you're on the wrong page, kiddo.

Internal Links

When linking to pages within your site, since the browser is already in your directory you don't have to include the full URL (web page address) in your link. In fact, it's better if you don't.

If you include the full URL the browser goes back out on the Internet to find your entire address all over again. If you don't include the full url, it just searches on your site. Much faster that way. To create a link to one of your own pages simply use:

<a href="mypage.html">My Other Page</a>
As you can see, if you keep all your HTML files in the same directory, then the link is simply the page name and extension, as shown in bold text in the above code example.

If the page you want to link to is kept in a different directory you still don't have to include the full URL. Suppose you have your index page in the main directory, and your poetry pages in a directory called poetry. Then you would link like this:

<a href="poetry/mypage.html">My Other Page</a>

What you've done is code in the correct server path in your link. If you need a better understanding of server paths, visit my tutorial on Server Paths.

TIP: Use the link balloon trick to add an interesting twist to your links.

Definitions:

URL: Uniform Resource Locator
a href: A is for Anchor, HREF for Hypertext Reference

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