Affiliate links should use the TITLE attribute
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Increase your affiliate conversions by using the TITLE attribute on your links.
The TITLE attribute for links has been around for ages. It’s one of my basic usability rules. Yet, no one respects my authority! Fools!The purpose of the title tag is to give users a preview of the link. This helps in 3 ways:
- Keeps surprises to a minimum
- Increases click-through rate
- Increases overall user satisfaction
If you don’t know, adding the TITLE attribute is easy. If you’re using WordPress, the pop-up window for the link button has a field called “Title,” which lets you specify a link title. Do this from now on. If you link to an affiliate page about, say, web hosting rates, title the link “Web Hosting Rates.” This title will then pop up in a little yellow box when the mouse hovers over the link.
In short, users hate surprises on the web when it comes to navigation. If your anchor text indicates one thing yet leads to something else, you then have one pissed-off user. Use link titles to increase user satisfaction. Please. Think of the children.
on November 2nd, 2007 at 9:27 pm
I’m a huge fan of the title link, both for usability and usefulness.
I even go a step further, and provide a bigger box with both the title and the URL when somebody hovers over a link on my site (I use the nice title script) - it looks better on FireFox than on IE due to PNG alpha blending, but it still works and looks nice.