What is an hyperlink ?
An hyperlink, was invented in 1965 by Ted Nelson. This is a one-way send to an electronic document. Hyperlinks are often in the form of text, but can be other type of data, such as images. A text enriched with hyperlinks is called hypertext. It can link two different documents or different areas of the same document.
On the web, hyperlinks are found in pages written in HTML. They are introduced using the <a> and <link> elements and are displayed and underlined in blue on web browsers. When these hyperlinks are viewed, they turn purple. However, the designer of a website can modify this appearance as he wishes. When the resource to be accessed via the link does not exist, we speak of a “broken” link or a “dead” link.
Types of hyperlinks on the web
Hyperlinks can be made with normal or reduced URLs. It is important to note that the length of an URL depends partly on the choice of its domain name. To link the pages together, hypertext links of different functions are used. However, we group into two main groups: internal and external hyperlinks. Internal links connect the pages of the same website. On the other hand, external links redirect to a resource external to the website on which it is located.
Internal and external links make browsing the web a lot easier. Search engines rely to crawl and reference websites. In fact, when a search engine starts on a page of a website, it will browse all the links on that page. Henceforth, it will go through all the pages of that website or domain name. It only stops if the contained pages are referenced at least once.
Other usages of hyperlinks
Hyperlinks are also used in other technologies such as XML. In this case, we speak of the XLink standard. Hyperlinks used in wikis. We are talking about Wikilien. When leading to a non-existent page, Wikilian usually has a different specific visual appearance. Hyperlinks are also found in PDF documents, spreadsheets,….
You can use the hyperlink for marketing reasons, for the SEO of a website, including making good use of inbound and outbound links when creating a website.