Linking Best Practices Redux

As a follow up to the previous posts Love your Links and My Name is URL, today’s post is a reminder to always consider linking best practices when writing content for your web site. We have seen many sites that copy and paste entire URLs into content or are using generic text for hyperlinks which is improper web form. Many of these web infractions are being committed on home pages or in posts which appear in the News feed on home pages which is a big web no-no.  Here are some reasons to avoid this practice:

• Copying the full URL breaks up your content flow, is distracting for the user, and makes the content appear unprofessional. This is especially true when this URL is very long and contains sessions IDs.
• Long URLs that wrap over multiple lines can break which frustrates visitors when they click on them and can lead to an increase in your visitor bounce rate.
• It does not help your site’s SEO since search engines index rich keyword links and not URLs that are unreadable.
• You can’t control whether clicking the URL will open in a new browser window or in the same window.

Fun fact: The highest search engine ranking for the phrase “Click here” is awarded to Adobe Reader.

Linking Do’s

• Always insert the hyperlink using keywords and descriptive text. Don’t use generic text such as “Click here”, “Download PDF”, “Go this page” or “See this article”. To create links, refer to the CCMS on-line manual procedures for Hyperlinks.

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• When describing contact details on your web page, instead of inserting the full email address into your content and creating an email link to the address, enter the contact person’s name only and link their name to their email address. This is a common web practice and most visitors recognize a hyperlinked name as an email link. For example:
  
  Use: Contact John Smith for more information.
  
  Do not use: Contact John_Smith@carleton.ca for more information.
• When linking to external content on your web site, create hyperlinks that open in a new window instead of the same (current) window. Although there are many schools of thought on this topic, and it depends on how users configure their browser settings, having external content open in the existing browser window can interrupt the user’s search of your site and the user may be less likely to return to your site to resume their search after starting a search on the external site.

Inserting links into emails

This practice also applies to inserting links in emails as well. When sending emails, if you copy and paste the URL directly into your email, the link breaks for URLs that wrap over two lines making them useless to the email recipient. Unless the recipient copies and pastes the link into their browser to view the required content, your message will be ineffective in communicating the web site. Additional text in an email describing how to access the link is also ineffective. We have seen examples where the URL of the home page is copied into the message with a long description of where to navigate to the target page from the homepage. A direct link to the target page in the original email message is the most effective and streamlined route to go in delivering a well-communicated message.

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1. Highlight the keyword or phrase in your email for which you want to create the link.
2. Right-click and select Hyperlink. The Insert Hyperlink window opens.
3. In the Address field, enter the URL of the content you want your display text to link to.
4. (Recommended) Click on the Target Frame button and select New window from the drop-down list. This ensures that a new browser window opens and the new URL does not overwrite the recipients’ current browser window. Click on the OK button.
5. Click on the OK button in the Insert Hyperlink window. Your email message now contains a hyperlink.

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