Compass Designs

If you are familiar with Joomla, you will know that the CMS uses the phrase "read more" when it links to a full article from the intro text.

This read more link is found on millions of Joomla powered websites, but is it the best choice of words?

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:

It’s been a bit since I’ve seen any actual test data on the use of actionable link anchor text, so I thought I’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!