Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

Recently, a vendor delivered us a bunch of produced web pages containing prominent "click here" links.  Ugh. As you might know, I consider "click here" an absolute worst practice. 

My colleage Neal in our Marketing group reminded me of some additional reasons why Click Here is so awful:

1. Missed opportunity. "Links are like highlights," says Neal "They grab the eye. Putting the link on content, e.g., 'download your free ROI tool'  vs 'click here to get your free ROI tool' increases the visibility of the content we care about."
2. User assistance. "Users like to know what links are going to do or where they will take them. Associating the link directly with the offer or destination (rather than to a mouse instruction) is much more user friendly. In an extreme situation, you could end up with multiple 'click here' links on the same page - all of which do different things. That's not a good user experience."
3. Searchability. "Search engines pay close attention to links - and to the text associated with those links. Page ranking and relevance are derived from this information. 'Click here' adds no value in that process."
4. It's very, very dated. "Good web designers have agreed for years that 'click here' is a bad idea. Having them on our web site reflects poorly on your familiarity with the latest in proper web design. It's also somewhat insulting to your audience -- who all know that links are meant to be clicked."

Exception: Friends of mine have observed that graphic buttons bearing a "click here" label can be pretty effective in an online selling situation when the context is crystal clear. But that's a lot different from "click here" as a text link in a sea of other text.

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