She knows how to do that, using whatever device she has–which might not involve clicking. What will the reader find at that link? Describe the destination instead of dictating how she should get there. It’s not about the journey, it’s about the destination. Why give the impression that your responsive, accessible site works only on desktops? “Click here” is patronizing. Writing “click here” not only ignores those other modes of navigation, but implies that other modes are not supported. A short list of things people might be doing instead of clicking: There’s also a huge range of assistive devices available to those who have trouble using a mouse. Most of those visitors aren’t using a mouse. Does more than half your traffic come from mobile devices? That’s true for me and most of my clients. Why would you forfeit such an important opportunity to describe the content you’re linking to? “Click here” is too restrictive.Ĭheck your traffic reports. You are, in theory, the most authoritative source of information about your subject. That’s bad enough if you’re linking to other people, but when you’re linking to your own content? That’s even worse. When you use “click here” for all your links, you’re removing half of the information Google uses to establish context. How does it figure out what a page is about? It compares the phrases people use when linking to a page and the text on the page itself. Google reads your page more or less the same way Colleen’s screen reader does, except it follows each and every link. “Click here” is deadly for your search engine optimization. “Click here” forces everyone to work harder to establish the context of the link, but it’s especially hard on the visually impaired. This list is useless to Colleen, but instead of merely reading back a couple of sentences to establish context, she’s going to have to listen to the entire page. Now imagine what that list sounds like if all your links are the same: This feature allows her to skim the page, just as we do when we let our gaze slide across the paragraph and focus on the links. Notice how it announces how many links are on each new page? That’s Colleen’s cue to press a button if she wants to hear only a list of the linked phrases on the page. If you’ve never heard one in action, listen to a couple of minutes: They’re mostly used by people with visual impairments. Screen readers, if you aren’t familiar with them, are applications that read the text of web pages aloud. Links written with unique and descriptive phrases don’t make us do the extra work of building this mental model as we read. If several links on a page say, “click here,” we have to remember the context of each one. But if all it says is, “click here,” we have to read back up to establish the context and figure out where that link might go. Links stand out, so if we’re skimming text–which most of us do–we tend to zoom right past the text leading up to the links and focus on the links themselves. Our eyes are drawn to things that are different. You’re already getting sick of seeing it on this page, aren’t you? But it’s so much worse for people with attention deficit problems or visual impairments. You should never, ever use “click here” in a web link. Everyone’s doing it, so it must be a best practice, right? An astonishing percentage of what I do with my clients’ web copy involves eradicating the phrase “click here” from their links.
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