{"id":733,"date":"2013-12-13T19:07:12","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T19:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/?p=733"},"modified":"2013-12-13T19:07:12","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T19:07:12","slug":"link-text-standards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/link-text-standards\/","title":{"rendered":"Link text standards"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Take a look at these two sentences:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You can read the post on the <a title=\"Search Engines\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/search-engines\/\">Web Team Blog<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>You can read the post at <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/search-engines\/\">http:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/search-engines\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Which is better?<\/p>\n<p>Answer? the first one. There&#8217;s a couple reasons.<\/p>\n<p>First, it turns out that descriptive text in links like this is actually really helpful for search engines to determine what&#8217;s on that page. So providing descriptive links can really help improve search.<\/p>\n<p>Second, if you&#8217;re linking to another Lane page from within Drupal, if you use descriptive text you don&#8217;t need to worry about ever updating the link. We&#8217;ll take care of it for you. If you use the URL as your link text, then you might get a weird situation where the link text no longer matches the url you&#8217;re linking to &#8211; it says &#8220;lanecc.edu\/science\/bio&#8221; but you&#8217;re actually sent to &#8220;lanecc.edu\/science\/biology&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Third, it simply looks better. No one wants to read long, ugly looking urls as part of their text.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;But wait,&#8221; you say, &#8220;what about when someone prints the page?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve thought of that. When you print a page from the Lane website, we automatically include the url next to the linked text. Of course, we&#8217;d rather you didn&#8217;t print web pages in the first place, but that&#8217;s a discussion for a different day.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s exceptions to this rule. Use common sense.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve added a check to our linkchecker, so from here on out we&#8217;ll be actively hunting for these links. We&#8217;ll fix some of them for you, but we may also contact you for some help rewording your content.<\/p>\n<p>As always, if you have any questions about best practices with content, send <a href=\"mailto:brendenl@lanecc.edu\">Lori<\/a> an email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Take a look at these two sentences: You can read the post on the Web Team Blog. You can read the post at http:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/search-engines\/ Which is better? Answer? the first one. There&#8217;s a couple reasons. First, it turns out that descriptive text in links like this is actually really helpful for search engines to determine &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/2013\/12\/13\/link-text-standards\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Link text standards&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_wpscppro_dont_share_socialmedia":false,"_wpscppro_custom_social_share_image":0,"_facebook_share_type":"","_twitter_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type":"","_pinterest_share_type":"","_linkedin_share_type_page":"","_instagram_share_type":"","_medium_share_type":"","_threads_share_type":"","_google_business_share_type":"","_selected_social_profile":[],"_wpsp_enable_custom_social_template":false,"_wpsp_social_scheduling":{"enabled":false,"datetime":null,"platforms":[],"status":"template_only","dateOption":"today","timeOption":"now","customDays":"","customHours":"","customDate":"","customTime":"","schedulingType":"absolute"},"_wpsp_active_default_template":true},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[7,16],"class_list":["post-733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-drupal","category-technical","tag-best-practices","tag-search"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":734,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/733\/revisions\/734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lanecc.edu\/webteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}