Click To Read More

Here is a pet peeve of mine. Sites, in an effort to appear usable put the same consistent link at the bottom of each of the content hints on their site’s landing page: “read more.” The idea simply is that you are giving them a reasonable sample of what the content consists of and if they want to read the entire piece then they need to click that fancy little link if they want to “read more.” Now, I am likely preaching to the choir here by even mentioning the next two points, but I consistently see people make this error. (At the end of the blog I recommend a new standard, so if you remain interested in why this is a problem, then read on.) Here are two very simple problems with the “read more” technique:

“read more” (or “Full Story” or “click here”) at a quick glance tells me nothing about what I am about to read more about. Assuming most people are buzzing your landing page, in search of (1) interesting content that they can (2) immediately click on, seeing “read more” just makes me slow down to read what was above it. The entire experience of “read more” kills the speed in terms of approachability, of people getting to your real content. The lesson here is that one should always link from meaningful text, not from simply verb ideas. Yes, you want them to “read more” but they want to read about something, not just more.

The number one indexed property of your website is your links. And what is, in fact, indexed then if you are too commonly using phrases like “read more”? Unless you are attempting to break some world record on getting the most hits for sites that are indexed around the key phrase “read more,” I recommend never using that as your link text again. If a piece of content in your site is about “hiking with relatives” then the link text should contain words like that, and not “read more.” When was the last time someone you knew hit google or yahoo and searched for the phrase “read more about hiking with relatives?

Now, you can likely verbalize the recommendation I am about to make since it was embedded into both above points. When you create links to expanded content (and I highly recommend not putting content other than content highlights on landing pages, but that is another blog), link to the content using highly meaningful link text that you would prefer getting googled on and that is easy to read from a user’s perspective. So, as the final example, assume the last paragraph here is a content highlight with appropriate link text:

Florida housing sex offenders under bridge
The sparkling blue waters off Miami's Julia Tuttle Causeway look as if they were taken from a postcard. But the causeway's only inhabitants see little paradise in their surroundings. Five men -- all registered sex offenders convicted of abusing children -- live along the causeway because there is a housing shortage for Miami's least welcome residents.