Your most important links are calls to action, writes HubSpot’s Kyle James. So how can you increase the chances that they’ll get clicked? Follow these five tips:

1. Avoid Fat Fingers/No Bars Syndrome.

Make “touch targets” at least 1cm × 1cm (0.4in × 0.4in) for mobile users.

2. Bold-face your most important links.

Visitors are 20% more likely to click on a bold-faced link, according to HubSpot research.

3. Go graphic.

Clickable images with text under them increased click-through rates by 100% in one Hubspot test.

4. Keep your call to action above the fold.

Visitors don’t always scroll.

5. Underline links and make them a different color.

Web users have learned to see underlined, colored text as links. Don’t make them learn a new approach for using your website.

“Users shouldn’t have to guess or scrub the page to find out where they can click,” writes usability expert Jakob Nielsen.

And if it’s not a link, don’t underline it. If you do, someone will click it. And that will confuse and irritate your visitors.

6. Make visited links a different color.

Reserve blue for unvisited links and use a clearly different, less saturated color for visited links, Nielsen suggests.

Some sites use gray for visited links, but Nielsen recommends that you avoid this practice. That’s because gray type is hard to read, and it’s often used online to show that something is unavailable.

7. Label links that do anything other than open a different webpage.

Let readers know if they’re opening a video or PDF by adding or [PDF] after the link.

Read Nielsen’s Guidelines for Visualizing Links and Link List Color on Intranets.
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Sources: Kyle James, “9 Ways to Optimize Your Links and Draw Attention to Your Calls to Action,” HubSpot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog, March 4, 2009

Jakob Nielsen, “Guidelines for Visualizing Links,” Nielsen Norman Group, May 10, 2004

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Think of links as the Goldilocks of microcontent: Some links are too long. Some links are too short. You want to write links that are just right.

Too long

Links are highly scannable. Blue underlined words stand out on a screen of black text on a white background.

But if everything stands out, nothing stands out. If your links are too long, your readers’ eyes may find nothing to land on.

The links in a PR e-zine, for instance, average 35 words. The longest tops out at 54. This one’s 32 words long:

That’s too long.

The solution: Link and bold-face the head; unlink and use plain text for the blurb. Like so:

That approach allows readers to scan headlines, then learn more from the blurb if they find something they like.

Too short

But if your links are too short, readers will have to read the copy around the link to understand what the link means.

Readers find this irritating. Plus, it slows them down, writes Jan H. Spyridakis, professor at the University of Washington College of Engineering.

MindHacks’ one-word links, for instance, are discombobulating. Who would click on article, acetylcholine, GABA, fentanyl, siege or BZ without knowing more?

They’re too short.

The solution: Rewrite sentences to create clusters of linkable words that give the context for the story. Instead of article, for instance, how about:

Or even:

Those five extra words add context, make the link clearer and the story more scannable — and may well increase clicks.

Just right

So how long should a link be?

‘Make links as short as you can and as long as you must.’ — Ann Wylie, writing coach
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Make them 7 to 11 words long (PDF), suggests Jared M. Spool, CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering.

His research shows that visitors find what they’re looking for more efficiently on sites with:

• Longer links or
• Links followed by descriptive sentences

Visitors were less successful on sites with super-short links.

So “link length is less important than a good link description,” writes Marieke McCloskey, a user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. “Use as many words as you need to accurately describe the page … while still being concise.”

In other words, as with most writing, make the link as long as you must and as short as you can.

But do keep it under 54 words.
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Sources: Marieke McCloskey, “Writing Hyperlinks: Salient, Descriptive, Start with Keyword,” Nielsen Norman Group, March 9, 2014

Jan H. Spyridakis, “Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web pages and Evaluating Their Success” (PDF), Technical Communications, August 2000

Jared Spool, Tara Scanlon, Will Schroeder, Carolyn Snyder and Terri DeAngelo: Website usability: A designer’s guide (PDF). User Interface Engineering (North Andover, Mass.), 1997

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