To Click Here or Not to Click Here
Click here is one of the many banes of my web existence. It’s taken as common knowledge these days that click here as anchor text simply isn’t best practice, and we should instead be using contextual, meaningful copy. Yet lately I’ve been seeing a backlash, in the guise of usability improvements. Yes, click here text is incredibly obvious to users, but more often than not it’s is used out of sheer laziness on the part of content managers and copywriters.
The biggest reason not to use click here is because of accessibility issues. If a visually impaired user scans a page for links, they’re absolutely worthless without some context, especially if you have cryptic URLs. Straight from the W3C’s mouth, checkpoint 13.1:
Link text should be meaningful enough to make sense when read out of context — either on its own or as part of a sequence of links. Link text should also be terse.
For example, in HTML, write “Information about version 4.3″ instead of “click here”. In addition to clear link text, content developers may further clarify the target of a link with an informative link title (e.g., in HTML, the “title” attribute).
While I agree sites should be written for their users’ benefit and not the search engines, who exactly does a non-contextual link help? Perhaps an advertiser, but certainly not a person trying to find relevant information. Click here is meaningless and is going to do the opposite of compelling me to click.
Additionally it’s all about context. Maybe read more isn’t the appropriate text to get someone excited about a new product, but it is appropriate when getting someone from an excerpt of a post to a full article. If the content is good they’ll click because they want to read more. If it’s not then even a cleverly worded link won’t save your site.
