Click here, here and here
Fault of the day, Usability October 1st, 2007
Using the words ‘click here’, ‘here’, ‘read more’, or ‘more’ as your link text is nearly always bad, very bad. Click here is this decade’s skip intro, worse in fact.
Because users scan pages for highlighted text – bold, different colour, and particularly underlined linked text – using meaningless link text makes a page more cumbersome to navigate and useful links become difficult to see.
Scanning through page text to see ‘click here’ several times and you have no idea what those links relate to or what is on the other end of them.
Using relevant link text makes links much easier to read and understand.
A few people will spend time to read more of the surrounding text and therefore won’t suffer so badly from ‘click here’ syndrome, but for most people, link text is very important.
This example of ‘click here’ shows why.
Other click here examples:
- www.greatrun.org
- www.dma.org.uk (note tiny unreadable text size)
- www.emigroup.com
- www.conferencebookings.co.uk
Meaningful link text is essential for intuitive navigation and contributes to good pagerank in search results. Good Web copywriters know how important this is and will know how to write useful link text.
Thankfully, ‘click here’ is becoming less common, but we still see too much of what is one of the easiest usability problems to fix.
Recent Comments