To Anchor or Not to Anchor a HREF

Have you been told that your site would be better with the addition of some HTML, possibly in the form of an anchor tag href? If you are new to the use of HTML, then that statement might not make much sense to you, so here is some help. An anchor tag is the coding which surrounds elements that define a link to some destination on your website. Within an anchor tag you will have the href, which indicates where the link will connect to. For example, my href will be a link address to a page on my website, and it will sit within an anchor tag.

  • Anchor a href tag.
  • To anchor a href you must either have an href that is a full link url, or a reference to a specific point on a web page. A specific point might be a heading in an article, or a picture, or a specific paragraph of content. When you anchor a href, you can use a hashtag to indicate the exact spot on the page that you are creating the link to.

  • Anchor without href.
  • Did you know that you can do this? It is entirely possible, since the href title tag is optional. By doing this you are creating a named anchor as opposed to a linked anchor. The use of a tag like this will not create a link at all, but a fragment identifier, and a fragment identifier is simply a group of characters that identifies one resource as being subordinate to a primary resource.

The use of anchors and href is slightly more complicated than your HTML basics, but it is a worthwhile tool for any website. There are many communities online that freely share information around how to use different tags effectively, so if you try out an anchor with a href, or without, and you do not get your desired effect, do not despair. Simply try again, and use the resources available to you.