If I had to choose my top pet peeve relating to the world of website design, it would definitely be that one, annoying, lazy, useless phrase to indicate a link:

click here!

Click where? Why here? Why not there? Where else am I going to click? What am I clicking on? Where am I going? Those are just a few of the questions that links labeled “click here” raise.

The world wide web should be, in my opinion, a loosely linked repository of semantic resources. That’s the ideal situation, of course; since 99% of everything on the WWW is horrible, we’re not there yet. But we few decent developers can still try to make our websites as semantic and sensible as possible. So, while they should be obvious, links don’t need to jump out of the screen and slap the user in the face. “Click here!”? Seriously? Don’t insult a user’s intelligence. If a visitor wants to follow a link, he’ll follow the link. But, that link needs to speak for itself.

By ‘speak for itself‘, I mean that the clickable portion of text should describe to the user what’s on the other side of the click. If you want to link to a page on, say, your favourite hockey team, don’t write this:

Want to read more about the Vancouver Canucks? Click here!

As you can see, the link (“Click here!”) doesn’t actually say anything about the resource to which it is pointing. Sure, there’s an explanation beforehand. But I would argue that anything surrounding the link is irrelevant; the eye is drawn to the link itself, so that’s where the important information should be. The World Wide Web Consortium (WC3), in its article “Don’t use ‘click here’ as link text“, recommends that link text should offer an exaplanation of the page to which it links and the information it offers, even when read out of context. The W3C emphasizes that one should not focus link text around mechanics (“follow this link here”), action verbs (“click”), and so on.

Website visitors know what links are and how to recognize them without explaining the mechanics of linking in the text. Too many web developers these days don’t want to give their users any credit. The bottom line is that if a person can figure out how to turn on his computer, open his internet browser, and navigate to a website, it’s a pretty safe bet that he’ll be able to recognize properly styled links. I say ‘properly styled’ because too many website owners try to be too pretty/stylish/different when it comes to presenting links. A link should be the last spot that the user expects to have strange styling. If links are recognizable – underlined, a different colour, an obvious change on hover (larger font, etc.) – users will find and follow them. One need not make the text blinking with a scrolling marquee; an understated but clear indication of a link to another resource will do the job. And, since we’re explaining the target resource in the text of the link, we don’t need to give a silly instruction like ‘click here’ to the user. A stop sign doesn’t say “press on the brake pedal”, nor does the door to a house say “open this to enter”. If we let the link speak for itself and put it in the context of other text, it will look something like this:

The Vancouver Canucks are my all-time favourite hockey team. They have speed, grit, scoring, and defense.

One would expect to find a website about the Vancouver Canucks on the other side of this link. We don’t need to say “click”, “follow”, or even something like “more information” – for example, ‘More Information on the Vancouver Canucks‘ – since the mere existence of the link implies that we’ll be getting more information. Additionally, this link tells the visitor exactly what to expect when he decides to follow without revealing how the visitor should do it.  Remember, not everyone will be ‘clicking’ on your links, since only a mouse clicks. Users navigating with the keyboard, a touch phone, a screen reader, and so on will not be clicking anything (admittedly most users will know what ‘click’ means even if they’re not using  a mouse, but it’s still good practice not to force mechanics on your visitors).

In his excellent article “Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005” (and, believe me, those mistakes still apply today), web usability and accessibility guru Jakob Nielson advises that links should

Explain what users will find at the other end of the link, and include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO). Don’t use “click here” or other non-descriptive link text.

As Nielson says, since links are the most common and prominent way for resources on the web to interact with each other, making links confusing and non-intuitive “is a sure way to confuse and delay users”. Many search engine optimization (SEO) experts also recommend against using ‘click here’ since search engines (so they claim) associate webpages with the words used to link to them; vague and irrelevant linking words such as ‘click here’ will only hamper a potential visitor’s ability to find these websites when searching (see, for example, Solo Signal’s “SEO Tip: Please Don’t Click Here“).

A responsible web developer ensures that a website is as accessible, usable, and sensible as possible. Using ambiguous phrases such as “click here” reduce the usabilty of a site by obfuscating one of the web’s most important elements, the link. For more information and references, see the Wikipedia page ‘Click here’.