The World Wide Web is navigated through a series of links. I remember the good 'ole days of the Internet when "surfing the Web" meant hitting the "Next" button in Mozilla until you hit the end of the Internet. Yes, there was an end.

Today, search engines "crawl" the Web following links and "calculating" the value of your content in the grand scheme of the Web.

For search engines like Google and Yahoo, your Web pages are ranked by complex computer algorithms. This is why search engine optimization is a very important part of your education as an online journalist. After all, you want people to find your content, right?

So, if linking is what makes the Web go round, then linking should be a major component of your online stories.

This is a direct order!

There are two types of links: internal and external.

Internal links refer to content within your Web site's domain.

External links refer to content outside your domain.

Which links do you think carry more "weight" in Google's algorithms? Yes, that's right, external links. So don't be afraid to link to content outside your site.

But here's some tips:

• Be sure the site you're linking to is credible. Don't link to 18-year old Billy Joe's MySpace page (unless your story is about Billy Joe's MySpace page).
• If you don't know who posted the content, then you're probably better off not linking to them.
• Be sure to always double-check your links, there is no bigger turn off to online news consumers than broken links.

Now, to the fun stuff!

HTML uses tags to mark the start and end of the text that is the clickable link. Therefore, the a href=" tag must be closed with after your link text. Remember, start tag < >, end tag .

You will use three different attributes to create your link. The three attributes that should be included in every link you create are:

1.href=""

The text in between the href quotes is the URL of the page you are linking to. This is the Web page your browser will take you to when you click on the link.

The text in between < and > is the text that will show up on your Web page as the clickable link text.

2. title=""

The text in between the title quotes will pop up when a user scrolls over your link. If you scroll over the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee link above you will see the title text more on the museum building.

The following code…

<a href="http://mcclungmuseum.utk.edu/newspecial_exhibit/samurai/samurai.htm" title="Exhibition of Historic Japanese Woodblock Prints">The Faithful Samurai: Kuniyoshi Woodblock Prints</a>  opens on May 14, 2006 at the Universty of Tennessee's Frank M. McClung Museum.

…will format your text like this...

The Faithful Samurai: Kuniyoshi Woodblock Prints opens on May 14, 2006 at the Universty of Tennessee's Frank M. McClung Museum.

Special thanks to Chris Brewer for his nifty Display HTML sample code utility.