I find this one difficult to balance – having been trained to adhere to the DDA and think accessbility first I try to avoid click here – but from a user perspective I think inline links are often lost. I wrote a blog post about a file that could be downloaded and had the link as an inline and got reams of comments asking where the file could be downloaded from! In the end I had to break my own rules and add Click here to download…

If anyone has a perfect solution I would love to hear it!

“In barry’s recent article revealing that monkeys like bananas…”

I think it’s fine, from a usability standpoint, to link “Barry’s recent article” or “monkeys like bananas” (although they differ in SEO intent), instead of using a direct call to action.

If, on the other hand, you need a strong call to action, it may need to be overt. If I post:

“Next Friday, I’ll be doing a webinar on SEO…”

…and I want people to sign up, just linking “webinar on SEO” probably isn’t enough. Here, I think it’s ok to break the flow a bit and put in a direct call to action, such as “Click here to sign up”. Of course, you could use a hybrid approach, such as:

“Sign up for my SEO webinar next Friday…”

…or something similar, and then link “Sign up” (at least it’s part of the sentence that way). Not so great for SEO, but it is a situation where people need and expect a direct call to action.

@Dan The only concern I have is that some visitors may not know the conventions. Perhaps your grandchild would have no problems but your grandparents who are new to all this might not know about text links.

@Andrea – I fully agree with not just pumping in keywords to the ALT tag. However I am suggesting the ALT tag should describe where the link will take you rather than just what the image is about. I wonder if that causes problems.