Nora Brown Design

How to add titles to your links

The web is built on links, and search engines as well as people use links to get from one page to another. That is why, in a recent newsletter, I encouraged people to use helpful, descriptive text when linking to other pages. For example:

You can view various logos I’ve designed.

Rather than:

To view logos I’ve designed, click here.

But sometimes, it may be difficult to structure your prose to accommodate this, or you may want to do something a little clever, like:

Several logos I’ve done have involved dogs or other animals.

These linked texts: “dogs”, “other”, and “animals” aren’t particularly descriptive of the content that is on the linked page. We can solve this problem by adding titles to our links.

Adding link titles using Textile

To add a title to your link, put it in parenthesis within the quotes, like so:

"dogs(Pyrs and Paws logo)":/portfolio/logos/logos.html#10

This will generate html like:

<a href="/portfolio/logos/logos.html#10
title="Pyrs and Paws logo">dogs</a>

And, to the end user, will look like: dogs

Benefits of titles

• Accessibility: Screen readers (audio rather than visual web browsers) will read out this information
• Usability: The title will usually appear as a “tooltip” when a user hovers over the link, to better inform them about the linked content
• Findability: Search engines use the information to improve results