Ensuring that your link text is not an afterthought in an otherwise solid design can help significantly increase the usability of a website.
Hyperlinks are everywhere on the web. They can be grouped in lists, part of a drop-down menu, embedded in sentences, displayed as images, part of an image or a flash module, or even hidden altogether. A big part of ensuring the usability of these links is making sure that they contain the appropriate text. This applies to both the text of the links themselves as well as for the tooltips (help bubbles) that are displayed when you mouse over them.
Users scan web pages looking for the information that need or for links to further information. Thus, it’s imperative that link text must be easy to understand and easy to understand quickly. Meaningless directive text such as ‘click here’ must be avoided as it is useless and inhibits scanning. Users definitely know that links can be clicked; a link’s text should be spent describing the link itself. This can also help limiting the length of the link text. Since users only spend a split-second looking at the text contained in any link, there should be no more than five words in a link. When scanning web pages for useful links, the first words users see are the words at the front of each link, so place important words at the front of the link. The word conveying the most useful information to the reader should be at the front of the link text. Users may not even see any of the words after the first two.
Tooltips can greatly improve the usability of both text links and image links. But writing helpful tooltips requires some thought. Tooltips provide more details or clarification to users that have requested some, so tailor their text accordingly. They are usually displayed in very small text and some browsers only display as fixed length of tooltip text. Therefore, they must be brief and descriptive. The first few words should give the user a good idea of what the link is about. That makes it easy for them to decide whether to use the link, forget it or read the rest of the tooltip for more information. In any case, you cannot rely on tooltips to provide required information because some users will not discover them and others may be using a browser with tooltips disabled.