ONWRITINGLINKS by STEPHEN GRAINER
Click here. These two words are perhaps the most over-used word pair you can find on the Web. At the same time, they are unhelpful in almost every case they are used. Most people, when writing for the Web, use them to exhort users to click on a link, whether that link leads to further information or begins an online process, like a registration or evaluation form. Telling a user to “click here” while reading a Web site may seem like a good idea. It provides an action for the user to perform that even the most inexperienced can figure out intuitively. What it doesn’t provide is a context for what the user can expect to find after they click. And therein lies the problem. The majority of Web users do not read deeply. They scan, looking for information relevant to their goals and only read deeply once they believe they have found what they are looking for. The most important information a user can scan quickly is links. Within a body of text, links stand out readily; they may be different colors, they may be bolded, they are almost always underlined. When a user scans a page and sees a link titled “Click Here”, he must then read the surrounding text to establish why he should click there. On the other hand, when a user scans a page that has a link titled “Virginia Dept. of Education, Office of Adult Education and Literacy”, he can infer that the link most likely leads to the VA DOE page for the Office of Adult Education and Literacy. This has repercussions for non-users, too. Part of the search-ranking system used by Google and other major search engines is based on the text used to link to various sites. You can see this for yourself by searching Google specifically for the phrase “Click here” (search for it with the quotes around it). The top results are all to freeware software (Adobe Acrobat Reader, Apple Quicktime, Internet Ex-
PROGRESS:. Volume 19, No. 3
Creating Links in Microsoft Word When you copy and paste a link into a Microsoft Word™ document, you generally need to type something after the link for it to become active. If the last thing you paste into a document is the link, then it’s possible it won’t be active. To get around this, you can simply type a space or a line break (the Enter key) after the link and Word should automatically convert it to an active link. If, for some reason, your links are still not being automatically made active, you can also create the links manually. To do this:
plorer) that many sites link to by saying “click here”. If you look in the text of the pages themselves, you won’t see a single instance of “click here”. So how can you make your links stand out to users and search engines alike? Make them contextual. Write for the Web in such a way that the text you use for links accurately but succinctly describes what the user can expect to find. Let’s look at an example and see how it might be improved.
The Wrong Way to Link
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1. Highlight the entire section of text you want to make a link. 2. Click the Insert menu and scroll down to Hyperlink. 3. This will bring up a window with a couple fields and options. Most of these you can safely ignore. 4. Input the webpage you want to link to in the Link to: field. (The name of this field may change depending on what version of Word you have.) It’s very likely that if you have a link highlighted, the link may already be in place in this field. 5. Click OK. 6. You should now have an active link.
The Best Way
NSCALL has released a new issue of Focus on Basics. This issue focuses on Correctional Education. Read the latest issue of Focus on Basics.
In Other Cases
When writing documents that may or may not be used on the Web, it’s best to actually show the link. For example, if you are creating a flyer in Word™ or writing an email, instead of making a text link, it’s best to use the actual Web address as the link. This way, if the document is printed, the link information is still available to people who may read the printed copy. .:
A Better Way
NSCALL has released a new issue of Focus on Basics. The latest issue focuses on Correctional Education. Read the latest issue online.
Got a question or suggestion for a future topic? Email hmajor@vcu.edu. 3
