How to Handle Links in Your Stories

Best practices to serve readers, enhance writer credibility, and honor your sources

Best practices on linking from non-fiction online stories is a fine point of writing, one rarely taught formally. Yet it’s a vital reader service, one that requires thoughtful curation, and one that’s often done poorly: stories with links whose placement offers no clue as to where they are going; links that go to pointless websites that don’t enhance the reader experience; links a reader expects to find that simply isn’t there.

If you write for a large publication, they might have a style guide for linking, but many do not. If you self-publish, then you’re truly on your own.

So I’m going to make a fuss about links. Now you might be wondering: Do links really matter that much?

Oh, yeah. For multiple reasons, including some you might not have considered.

Here’s an oddly placed fact: Most readers don’t follow most links. I know this from data in my previous life as an editor and executive at data-driven media companies. A thousand people might read a story and perhaps one or two people—maybe maybe a few dozen—will follow a link to read some other thing.

So why do we link? Well, heck, for those handful of truly engaged readers, we want to provide the best experience, make a fan. But links have a subliminal effect on all readers: They communicate credibility, authority, completeness. And if you want search engines to notice your story, links are crucial. When a reader reads your story, truly stays with it for a period of time, Google notices. If the reader then follows one of your links to another web page, and truly sticks with that, Google notices. If the reader follows a link and is disappointed and leaves quickly, Google notices.

Cookies tell Google if readers are nibbling and eschewing your stuff, or if they’re taking big, satisfying bites, and that’s one way Google decides whether to send more people to your story.

One rarely discussed reason to pay attention to link strategy: If someone whose hard work you’ve sourced reads your story, and sees that you’ve linked to their work, you are their hero (alternately, if no link, you’ve made an enemy).

But mainly we pay attention to link strategy to please readers. So how do we do it?

Think like a reader

The strategy the follows is rooted in best practices taught to journalists and other mainstream media writers, including approaches based on simple logic, and tactics that have been tested and measured. They all stem from a simple core question:

As a reader of a given story on a given publication, what would you expect from links?

That approach suggests a lot of latitude within the proven tactics. If you write for a niche pub where readers are highly educated on the topic, you might handle links differently than if you write for the latest BuzzKillNews clickbaity site. What you’ll find here will work anywhere outside academic publishing, and assumes a target audience of intelligent lay readers, who may not know everything about your topic, but who don’t fall for clickbait. They are your fans, or they will be if you get this stuff right.

The goal with every link you include in a story is threefold:

• Serve readers. Give them access to information and references that will inform and enhance their experience (this is the most important of the three).

• Establish credibility. Show that you did your research, didn’t just pull these facts out of thin air.

• Honor the sources. Give experts, journals and other references and sources due credit.

We’ll consider the how, when and why for inline text links, inline links with thumbnails, “further reading” links at the bottom, plus approaches to avoid.

Inline links in stories

When your writing refers other stories, research papers or any reference material that’s available online, link to them inline, from the story text (from what’s called “anchor text”). Choose the fewest possible words that will best cue the reader to where the link goes. Examples: