HTML - Anchor Tag

What is an Anchor Tag?

An anchor tag is an HTML tag. It is used to define the beginning and end of a hypertext link. It contains visible words within a text that can be clicked and the URL of the link's target. Search engines use this HTML tag in order to determine the subject matter of the linked target.

How to build a Hyperlink with an Anchor Tag

<a href="https://basic-to-expert-development.blogspot.com">My Blog</a>

An Anchor tag is defined with '<a>' and consists of three parts,but we study only two parts of Anchor Tag:

• the href attribute,
• and the target attribute.

href attribute

To create a hyperlink, the destination (address) of the document must be known. A hyperlink can link to pages on your own domain, to other websites.

If you want to link to the Google homepage, the code looks as follows from:

<a href="http://www.google.com">Google Home</a>

Href is short for hypertext reference. This attribute defines the target address of the document, which is to be linked to (http://www.google.com). The “=” sign is the connection of the attribute with the attribute value, whereby “href” is the attribute and “ http://www.google.com ” is the attribute value. There is an apostrophe before and after the attribute value. The defined phrase “Google Home” is called anchor text or link text. This part is clickable in the text. An anchor text is ideally informative and relevant to the landing page.

If you want to link internally to another part of your website, you don’t have to specify the full address, the filename is sufficient:

<a href="MyPage.html">My Page</a>

If you use the full address, it can cause the page to load slowly.

Target attribute

The target attribute specifies how the destination page or the target document should be opened. (target = "  _ blank " ) is used for opening of the target page in a new window. This is the usual option when using target attributes for linking to other pages.

<a href="http://www.mypage.com" target="_blank">Linktext</a>