Click here

From Free net encyclopedia

"Click here" is a phrase that often appears as the link text of a hyperlink, or in an image used as a hyperlink, on a web page.

Many web publishers simply use the instinctive Click here link text to direct visitors to either another part of their site, or somewhere else on the Web. It is the equivalent to tick here or check here on a paper form. As such, this has led to the phrase being probably the most popular link text on the World Wide Web, besides the generic term homepage.

This practice, regarded by many as the practice of untrained web designers, has received much criticism from web design authorities. These criticisms are mostly built on the reasons of accessibility, device dependence, non-informative, non-printability, redundancy and search indexing.

Accessibility: Visitors using screen readers (like Job Access With Speech or Window-Eyes) can make their reader read out just the hyperlinks on the page, including the option of tab scanning from link to link. Links labeled "click here" are not self-explanatory and are difficult to use.

Device dependence: As we progress into the future, more devices are accessing the Web in different ways. To say "click here" might have worked previously in the beginnings of Web history for a device such as a mouse, but is not currently a correct mechanical method for activating links with newer devices using touch pads, buttons, wheels, pen pointers, voice commands, etc.

Non-informative: People generally don't read online, they scan. Using meaningful link text, rather than "click here", makes it easy for users to quickly see links on pages that might be of interest. It is common for web links to stand out against the text when pages are viewed in a web browser. These links that stand out, however, would not offer information regarding where the link leads to. It is generally more user-friendly for the stand-out text to directly contain the information regarding the link. For this reason, the World Wide Web Consortium, through its Quality Tips for Webmasters, advises web designers to avoid using "click here" as link text. [1]

Non-printability: Users may want to print web pages for reference. When pages with "click here" as the link text are printed out, "click here" would seem absurd for the person who is viewing the printout. For this reason, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, through his Style Guide for online hypertext, advises web designers to "try to avoid references in the text to online aspect". [2]

Redundancy: Using the phrase "click here" for a link is redundant, because users already understand the link can be clicked upon. At a web page with twenty or more "click here" links, scanning such word repetition could be annoying and would not reveal any useful information about the links.

Search indexing: Most all of the major search engines use not only meta descriptions, title, and body text to create a combined word relavance, but they also include words in hyperlinks for overall indexing and page ranking. Using "click here" to identify links will only hurt the indexing of web pages. Using a descriptive link text will better serve search engines in their determination of word strength.

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Critics' recommendations

Critics of the "click here" convention advise web designers to ensure that linked text says something about the link's subject or destination. They also advise against using verb phrases as links, recommending, for example, linking the words registered member in "Become a registered member" instead of linking click here in "To become a registered member, click here".

In news articles that continue across several pages, links similar to "Click here" that read "More", "Continued", or "Full story" are common. Some also cite these as bad examples of link text, saying that the link text should include words describing the article's subject (and that the size of such an improved link could still be limited to a single line).

For clickable images, it is not necessary to use "click here" to get the user to understand the image is also a link. Designers should simply underline the subject, or non-verbal text on the image to relay it as being a clickable image.

A side benefit of these practices is potential optimization with search engines such as Google, because such engines often associate the text in links with the web pages being linked to. "Click here" provides no such useful information for a search engine.

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Popularity

Despite advice to avoid its usage, the term is popular on the Internet. Many languages other than English have similar phrases. For example, the Spanish version is Template:Lang, German: Template:Lang, or in French: Template:Lang.

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