Click here. This phrase seems helpful on the surface; you’re telling users exactly what you want them to do, but click here is problematic for many reasons including:

  • Click here is quickly becoming outdated because it assumes your users are using a mouse rather than a touch-screen device.
  • Site visitors who use screen readers can scan your page to read only the links. Click here lacks the context to be useful.
  • If a visitor prints your page, click here loses all relevance and becomes useless filler text.

Even the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the accepted web standards organization, recommends against using click here.

Google and other search engines prohibit click here in their paid ad results. Google’s reasoning is that click here and its variations “could apply to any ad, regardless of content”.  That is a nice way of saying click here isn’t unique and won’t provide your visitors with any good information about the content of the page. This is sound advice that should apply to your organic search results and landing pages as well. Providing good information any way you can becomes particularly important when you consider that recent research says people only read about 20% of any webpage.

When people do read webpages, they read the parts that stand out. This makes headlines, sub-headings, bulleted lists and links very important. People should be able to figure out what your page is about if they only skim those four things. If they find something relevant in the parts that jump out they may read the rest of your page. ‘Click here’ doesn’t help people figure out what your page is about. A link to ‘2013 tuition information’ or ‘Download XYZ form’ tells users that your page has the information they need and exactly where to find that information. No questions or confusion.