How to Customize Links in a WordPress Post by Jacqueline O. Moleski Have you ever wanted to add links to your blog posts? The easiest way to insert a link is to copy and paste the link into your post, then highlight it and click the link button. However, especially for long links, this simple method can result in messy-looking text. Creating Links - the Wrong Way In order to create links to content outside WordPress, if you click the link button Then fill in the Link Box, by copying the link .url in the URL field and writing the shorter title in the title field - nothing will happen. Either the full link will appear, or you'll get a non-working link. What's to do? Creating Links - the Right Way In WordPress, you actually type the short title into your post, highlight that, then click the Link button. Once the hyper-link pop-up opens, copy and paste the link into the URL box but leave the Title box blank, then click Add Link. When you go back to the post you are composing, the words you've highlighted will be red, indicating it's a link. So for example, let's say you want to link to this article, A Constructionist English Language Teaching Project Based on an Aeronautical Conceptual Design Challenge. It's a mouth full, isn't it? And the .url is even longer. So, make your blog post easier to read, you can summarize the article title with standard academic or business writing tactics, such as, "For more on Constructionist Design, see Tatzl." This prevents any copyright infringement, yet is shorter, more to the point, and easier to understand. Then highlight the important words, click the link button, add the full .url in the .url box (be sure you don't have http or https in the .url box twice) and click, Add Link. Crosslinking Posts on Your Own Blog Another cool thing about WordPress is you can make internal links to other posts on your blog. Simply type the text you want in your first post, highlight it, click the link button, then search for the post you want to link using the Search box. When you find the post, highlight it and click Add Link. These two techniques allow you to add cool, "For more information see this post," items to your posts. It also brings more interactivity to your blog and allows another way, besides categories and tags, to link posts. For readers of your blog, it means they can jump directly to additional content.
