Links

It is important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) to have a mix of internal and external links on your page. This will help users to organically find your content.

Internal links

An internal link is a link you can find in the content tree of the Content Management System. Any link that begins with 'le.ac.uk' is an internal link, as it lives within Sitecore.

Highlight the text you want to link on the page (learn more about creating effective link text). Then select the internal link icon. If you hover over the icons, the internal link icon shows as 'Insert Sitecore link'.

The content tree will show. You need to navigate to the page you wish to link to. In the below example this page is found at: le.ac.uk/about/history/campus-history/military-hospital. 'le.ac.uk' is 'Home' in the content tree. So we need to open the arrow next to 'about', then 'history', then 'campus history' and then we can select 'military hospital'. So, we are working our way through the URL structure to find the page in the content tree.

Then click 'insert' in the bottom right corner of the window.

External links

An external link is any link to a website which lives outside of 'le.ac.uk'. Even though Attenborough Arts Centre is part of the University, their website is hosted on a different server and has the URL 'attenborougharts.com', which shows it is not part of Sitecore.

To add an external link, highlight the text you want to link (learn more about creating effective link text) and click the icon to add an external link. If you hover over the icons in the Rich Text Editor, this one should say 'hyperlink manager'.

The URL field will already be pre-filled with 'http://'. This needs to be removed and then your external URL added.

Make sure you are adding a full URL (including the 'https://') and do not add a URL which has been generated as a safety URL via MS Office. These URLs will start with 'eur03' and mean that the link won't load as quickly, as it is going through a redirect process. Best way to make sure you are adding a proper URL is to take it from the URL bar in the browser after the external page has loaded and add straight to the 'hyperlink manager'.