From e-mail to blog posts to website content, much of our business writing these days is “clickable.” There are several ways to put links in your text. Which linking style looks most professional? I’m not going to focus on the technical part of making links — which is usually as simple as clicking a menu button. Instead, I’m going to talk about the phrasing.

One of the ugliest ways to include a link is this: CLICK HERE!! By all means, avoid the words “click here,” and particularly avoid capital letters. Readers know how to follow a link. Saying “click here” (1) wastes words, (2) doesn’t tell the reader anything about the linked site, and (3) smacks of spam advertising.

The more contemporary understated version of “CLICK HERE” is to incorporate direction words into the flow of your text. For example: You can find a linguistics blog here, and food writers here, here, and here. While much better than “click here,” direction-word links are a little bit coy: they force the reader to click on them before knowing exactly where they lead. In informal contexts, they’re acceptable, but don’t rely on “here” when writing something really impressive.

The best way to format links is to incorporate them unobtrusively in the sentence. For your link text, choose a word or phrase that refers specifically to the topic of the linked page. For example, link a company name to its website, link a confusing word to its Wikipedia page, and link to any reference when you mention it. Should you link the whole phrase? Or just the main word? That’s up to you. Just be consistent.

One more thing: avoid putting two different links next to each other. A reader won’t necessarily know that each word goes to a separate page!