"Reaction [beta]"
"Click here" 20 Sep 2007
Many usability professionals advise against use of link labels like "click here" - usually on the basis that they aren't descriptive enough. SEO experts feel similarly, reasoning that they don't give Google enough "juice". Brian Clark at Copyblogger, however, sees no reason to dismiss these calls to action. In fact, in many situations, he thinks they make a website more user-friendly - and, as far as SEO goes, he wonders why it's worth bothering to optimise for search engine page ranking algorithms that no one fully understands:
"I've always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it's a no brainer--it's been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you'll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do. Simple as that."
Clark uses statistics from a recent Marketing Sherpa study (performed with its newsletter readers) to substantiate this claim:
"The goal was to find out if the wording used in hyperlinks could make a difference in clickthrough rates. The answer is yes. They found that the right two or three click link words can lift clickthrough rates by more than 8%.
"Here are the results:
- "Click to continue": 8.53%
- "Continue to article": 3.3%
- "Read more": (-)1.8%
Our own research is consistent with these findings. However, it's important to stress that "click here" links must be used wisely and judiciously. They can make a page less scannable, if they are used too frequently, for example. And tech-savvy audiences sometimes feel that they insult their intelligence ("I don't need you to tell me how a link works!"). It's also worth noting that they should feature at the end of a paragraph / text block and not be embedded within it (as this disrupts the reader's flow) and that they must always be supplemented with a descriptive title attribute to assist blind users / users of screen-readers.
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3 comments so far
SEO 20 Sep 2007 11:24 AM
This is very true, however it's possible to strike a happy medium between using "actionable" words for users, and also content related words for search engines. Such as:
"Click to Download Widget"
This way your identifying the link as a download, what will be downloaded and an action word to entice people to click it.
It's good for users as it identifies everything, and also helps search engines know it's related to a "Widget Download" and can value the link accordingly.
Carly,
Matthew Pennell 20 Sep 2007 12:56 PM
AFAIK the latest wisdom on screenreaders is that they generally ignore the title attribute, unless that particular setting has been enabled.
One way to get around this problem is to create well worded link text ("Click here for more information on our widgets", or "To read more about our widgets, click here"), but then wrap everything apart from 'click here' in a SPAN or similar and hide it using CSS.
Screenreaders get the entire link text, while visually you just end up with "Click here" as your link.
Simon 20 Sep 2007 01:41 PM
Carly: Good tip! It may also be worth considering a button, depending on the context.
Matthew: The latest versions of JAWS and Windows Eyes support title on standard <a> links but, you're right, you need to enable it in the settings. HomePage Reader doesn't support this attribute, but this screen-reader has been phased out by IBM (although we still need to take it into consideration for the time being).
Per the CSS-hiding solution you propose, I'm assuming you mean "hide" the content by rendering it outside of the boundaries of the browser window (e.g. using position: absolute; left: -9000px etc.) and not via the use of display: none or display: hidden (as most screen readers won't read text that's hidden using these properties).