Introduction To Wordpress Links
Links, links, links! These are what make the web work!
Setting up your outbound links in Wordpress is essential to give out some link love to those that you want to. Link to your friends, websites or bloggers you admire. You may want to just add links for your own convenience to take you to sites you visit often.
But first of all you need to know how to add them to your sidebar(s) in Wordpress.
Wordpress has a standard Links widget which you can easily add to any sidebar to display all the links you have set up for your site and it includes all links in all link categories when it displays.
By default Wordpress is configured with a set of links setup in the “Blogroll” links category. You can see these if you go to Edit Links immediately after you install Wordpress.
Blogroll is an old blogging term for a links lists, which still persists today, but is likely to disappear from future version of Wordpress.
Adding the Links Widget to a sidebar will mean that all these links will then be displayed in that sidebar. Most of these links are pointing to Wordpress websites and pages, which may be of interest when you are learning Wordpress, but can soon become to seem irrelevant once you start bloggin and want to link to sites you choose. I normally get rid of these default Blogroll links as soon as I want to add a link of my own to a sidebar.
How To Delete (and Edit) Links in Wordpress
To delete old links (or edit them) just click on Links in the admin dashboard menu and then on Edit to see this page:
Then click on the checkbox to the left of Name and then select Delete from the Bulk Actions and hit the APPLY button.
All the links listed will then be deleted.
You can then add your own links in a different links category that makes more sense to you!
NOTE: You can also use the above page to edit any other existing links you may have already created.
How To Add Links to Wordpress
Click on Links in the admin dashboard options menu and then on Add New and you will then see this page displayed:
Adding a new link is very easy to do.
[1] First of all enter the anchor text for the link into the Name field.
This should be descriptive text that will remind you or tell your visitors something relevant about the website or web page that the link points to.
Depending upon the reason why you are adding this particular link you may want to embellish the text with wording to encourage a visitor to click on the link.
[2] Secondly you need to enter the FULL Web Address of the web site or web page that your new link is pointing to. This must always include “http//:” (no quotes!) and “www.” if the target site normally requires it.
It is extremely important to get this right otherwise your links will not work.
It is recommended that you have the web page or web site you are linking to open in another browser window and just copy that page’s website address URL from the web address box in the browser and paste it directly into the Web Address field in Wordpress. This will remove the possibility of making an error.
[3] Next enter a description for the link which will be displayed when a visitor hovers their mouse cursor over the text link name anchor text.
This is useful to add additional information or a call to action to the lin that your visitors will see.
[4] Add the Link to a link Category. This is used to group similar links together and to give a heading to a group of links when they are displayed in the sidebar using the Links Widget.
Therefore it is suggested to ignore the old Blogroll and add a new Link Category of your own. So click on the + Add New Category link.
Enter your New Category Name, click on the ADD button and the new link category will be added to the displayed list of available link categories.
[5] Select a target window for the link if you want to. If required click on the relevant radio button.
If you select “_blank” the target site or page linked to will open in a new window.
Finally click on the ADD LINK button to create your new link.
Adding Link Categories
If you want to add Link Categories independently of the link creation process above you can do so.
Just click on Link Categories under Links in the admin dashboard menu to display the Link Categories page:
Simply add a Category Name and a Description if you need one and then click on the ADD CATEGORY button. The new link catagory will then be created.
Note that the Category Slug will be automatically created for you but that you can amend it if you want to. The slug is used as part of the web page URL for the link category created.
How To Display Wordpress Links In A Sidebar
In order to get the links you have setup using the methods above you will have to add the Links Widget to a sidebar on your Wordpress.
This is easy to do and follows the same procedure for adding any widget.
You need to realize though that there are no configuration options for the links widget and the links will displayed in the link category groups you have setup with each group listed under the relevant link category as a header.
That’s the end of this link tutorial – so go add some links!
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I am having a problem with my link categories. Even though I select a category that I’ve created, the first few go in correctly and then later links automatically are going into the blogroll section. How can I fix this problem? Thank you!
great post.Very helpful information .
Thanks
Linda – that’s a strange one – did you fix it?
very helpful. thanks so much
Finally a straight forward description. Thank you.