Links and attribution

There are a lot of good reasons to add links to content. You want to drive traffic to a post, you want to corroborate a point, you want to improve SEO—add a link!

What there's less consensus around is how to create those links and what exactly gets contained within a link. Let's clear that up with a few dos and don'ts.

Do

• Provide a link whenever you're referring to something on another page or site.

• Open links in a new tab when given the option, unless you're linking internally (ie. to another page within an app or on the same website).

• Link only the words that need to be attributed with the link.

  • Traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce sales in the U.S. alone hit $2.3 trillion last year.

• Limit linked text to five words or less.

• Link to Pixel Union products using a pixelunion.net link—unless you're linking to a Shopify app, in which case link to the Shopify App Store.

Don't

• Say things like “Click here!” or “Read this.” Write the sentence as you normally would, and link relevant keywords.

  • Good: "From discount apps to support apps, there's a solution just for you."

  • Bad: "Check out this discount app and this support app..."

• Include preceding articles (a, an, the, our) in your linked text.

  • Good: "Check out our brand new style guide for answers to your burning questions."

  • Bad: "Check out our brand new style guide for answers to your burning questions."

• Link punctuation if the link comes at the end of a sentence or before a comma (in other words, only link punctuation if there is linked text on both sides of it).