How To Make Your Links Stand Out

Do your links suck? Are they somewhat colored text or do they stand out from the rest of your text in your emails, blog posts and web pages?

Do they stand at attention and beckon your readers to click? Somewhere along the way of cascading style sheets, designers thought it would be cool to remove the underline in text links. Usability experts cried foul and rightly so.

People are trained to recognize clickable links that have an underline. I have actually tested this in emails, and underline always wins..

Lets say I want to promote the 4th annual Email Summit by MarketingSherpa. Which link stands out the most when promoting the Email Summit by MarketingSherpa?

Did you know that simply inserting a relevant graphic can not only increase your click-through rate but actually get more clicks than text alone? So wouldn’t it be logical to make your images stand out a little more rather than simply being eye candy? Believe it or not, but both images below have a border of 2.

I’ve included the video below to show you how to make your links and images stand out if your blog theme, crazy web designer or something else has caused your links to blend in a little too much.

Here is the code to add to your text links. The video shows you how to do it in detail.

<a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com” style=”text-decoration:underline;font-weight:bold;”>Your Text

Here is the code to make your clickable images stand out.

<img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/someimage.gif” alt=”alt text” style=”padding:8px;border:1px;border-style:solid;border-color:#000000;” border=”2″>

I’m not a css jedi, so there are probably a ton more elegant ways to do it. But this is the simple copy and paste version.

Hope that helps. Subscribe to my blog below for more helpful videos.

big jason
P.S. To put a blue border around your youtube videos, add this to the youtube url in the last part of the flash code: &color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&border=1
[tags]email summit, marketingsherpa, marketingexperiments, click through rate, usability, jimmy ellis, dr. flint mcglaughlin[/tags]