I have a client that generally wants to link to additional information by using the phrase “Click here to …” They only want to include the words “click here” in the link with the rest of the sentence left as plain text. This is bad practice for a couple of reasons. First, it doesn’t offer an assurance to the user that the link will take them to a place that they want to be. Second, it doesn’t afford search engines a chance to weigh the link with relevant keywords. Third, links can be scanned within a document, which is a useful feature of screen readers. People with visual disabilities can scan a document for its links so they can quickly find information. Imagine listening to a list of links that all say “Click here.” That is not very useful. Additionally, I personally think it looks amateurish.

Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the Internet, has a style guide for links. The W3C has a page on their site under the guise of Quality Web Tips entitled Don’t use “click here” as link text. Here is another article that I found entitle Why “Click here” is bad linking practice.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 10:18 am and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.