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How to get People to Read More of your Joomla site

February 20, 2008 By barrie@compassdesigns.net Leave a Comment

I have always advised Joomla webmasters to to use a great mambot from Run Digital. It makes the read more link include the title of the article, great for SEO.

I had also always suspected that the phrase "read more" was not a very good call to action. This is the concept that you need to tell your web visitor exactly what you want them to do, in theis case click on the link to read the rest of the article.

I was interested to find a recent blog post about actionable anchor text on Copyblogger. In his article he explains:

ItÂ’s been a bit since IÂ’ve seen any actual test data on the use of actionable link anchor text, so I thought IÂ’d share the results of a Marketing Sherpa experiment performed with their newsletter readers. The goal was to find out if the wording used in hyperlinks could make a difference in clickthrough rates.

The answer is yes. They found that the right two or three click link words can lift clickthrough rates by more than 8%.

Here are the results:

  • “Click to continue”: 8.53%
  • “Continue to article”: 3.3%
  • “Read more”: (-)1.8%

The lesson is clear. Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response. Click here to read the original Marketing Sherpa article in its entirety.

Clearly the Joomla version is not the best option.

Fortunately, its easy to fix, we just need to make a simple change to the language file, which can be found at /language/english.php (mine is English obviously).

On about line 104 you will find:

/** content */
DEFINE(‘_READ_MORE’,’Read more…’);
DEFINE(‘_READ_MORE_REGISTER’,’Register to read more…’);

Change the ‘Read more…’ to something a little more active, perhaps:

DEFINE(‘_READ_MORE’,’Click to read more of this article…’);

Hopefully that should get you about a 6-7% increase in your clickthroughs!

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The Skinny

I am an entrepreneur, web consultant, author and educator.

I have been involved in starting a K-12 School District, a Private High School, and three web tech companies. I also wrote one of the original and best selling books on Joomla.

And I like sailing with kids.

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