I was searching for a way to link to a specific tab on one page from another. My initial process was to add a check to my JavaScript to see if a parameter was passed to the page containing the tab I wanted. I actually ran the site like this for over a month before I learned that jQuery has already through about this issue and provided a solution.

Let's say you have the following layout for a set of tabs:

<div class="tabs">
    <ul>
        <li><a href="#tab-1">Tab 1</a></li>
        <li><a href="#tab-2">Tab 2</a></li>
        <li><a href="#tab-3">Tab 3</a></li>
        <li><a href="#tab-4">Tab 4</a></li>
    </ul>
    <div id="tab-1">Tab 1 Content</div>
    <div id="tab-2">Tab 2 Content</div>
    <div id="tab-3">Tab 3 Content</div>
    <div id="tab-4">Tab 4 Content</div>
</div>

Really standard I know but still helpful.

I need to direct the user to the second tab to act on some important piece of information. I could ask them to do this or I could add #tab-2 to the end of the url for the page to direct them to the correct tab automatically.

<a href="/path/to/file.php#tab-2">Click here 
to see some important information!</a>