How To Make Links That Peo­ple Can’t Help But Click

Cre­at­ing a suc­cess­ful web­site is largely about know­ing how to make ef­fec­tive links.

• It’s ef­fec­tive links that will bring vis­i­tors to your website.
• It’s ef­fec­tive links that will en­sure peo­ple buy your prod­ucts and find the more im­por­tant parts of your site.
• It’s ef­fec­tive links that will help peo­ple to find the things they’re look­ing for and get real value from your on­line products.

Un­for­tu­nately though, most web­mas­ters and blog­gers have no idea how to cre­ate a link that begs to be clicked.

If most of the links on your site are sim­ple text links with an an­chor like ‘click here’ then you’re re­ally not help­ing your­self or your site.

This ar­ti­cle will help change all that and show you the ba­sics of cre­at­ing links that al­most click themselves…

Ap­pear­ance

Whether you’re cre­at­ing a text link or an im­age link, there are im­por­tant vi­sual cues that can help to make them more clickable.

For in­stance, did you know that sim­ply chang­ing your links to the colour red can greatly in­crease the like­li­hood of them get­ting clicked? That’s be­cause they sug­gest ur­gency, and ac­tu­ally look­ing at a red link is enough to even in­crease our heart rate un­til we click it.

This is the case most of the time at least.

Of course if your site is red or or­ange (urrr…) then a red link won’t be as ef­fec­tive. That’s be­cause you need to make sure your links jump off the page by us­ing con­trast­ing colours.

Also im­por­tant too is to en­sure your links work within the colour scheme of your site. Red and green should never be seen… Though hope­fully you al­ready knew that.

Oh, and of course they should also be big.

An­chor Text

The an­chor text is the writ­ing that your users will click in or­der to visit the link.

The most suc­cess­ful an­chor text should per­fectly de­scribe the page that the link links too, but at the same time en­sure that peo­ple feel com­pelled to go there.

One of the best tools for do­ing this is to keep an el­e­ment of mys­tery sur­round­ing your links - be­cause hu­man na­ture is highly curious.

If a link says ‘This Pic­ture of a Dog Made Me ROTFL’ then peo­ple are go­ing to be cu­ri­ous to see the pic­ture, but at the same time will know roughly what to ex­pect. It’s the per­fect ex­am­ple of mys­tery with de­scrip­tion and as an added bonus it also looks nat­ural which means Google will like it and so will your SEO company .

It’s also good be­cause it’s short, which makes it look more click­able - peo­ple like to click on the cen­tre of links don’t you know?

The same goes for us­ing pictures.

Pic­tures will need to do the same job as an­chor text for im­age links and that means show­ing peo­ple what the link is about while also in­volv­ing an el­e­ment of mystery.

Note as well that im­ages can be pow­er­ful tools for at­tract­ing at­ten­tion - the hu­man brain is wired to no­tice cer­tain things with hu­man faces be­ing one of the most important.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: This ar­ti­cle says it all, noth­ing to add … ex­cept, I like to use the oc­ca­sion to point to our pop­u­lar hy­per­link cre­ator; our on­line tool for cre­at­ing hy­per­link HTML code for sin­gle links or for turn­ing a text URL list into click­able links. If you don’t know how to cre­ate the an­chor text men­tioned above, this tool will do it for you.