SEO Tip: Please Don’t Click Here

July 2, 2007 | Filed Under Copywriting, Search Engine Optimization, General

Click HandAs the waitress mindlessly points in the general direction of the restrooms, the tension on the walls of your bladder increases. You bob and weave through the tables and make an awkward lunge towards a corner of the building with two doors. You think you are home free except that both doors sport the same sign: “Enter here.” Which is the men’s? Which is the women’s? You’ll never know, and neither will any of your site visitors when presented with similarly useless text, “click here“. Go ahead and click it, I dare you…

Just as bad as your visitors being left in the dark, search engines will also have a difficult time with ambiguous links such as these. Anchor text is the text used in a hyperlink and is used by search engines to associate keywords with the link. Take this link for example: “The Web Stack Explained“. In this link the anchor text is “The Web Stack Explained”.

Using non-descriptive anchor text in links on your web pages is bad for several reasons:

  1. Visitors will have a difficult time determining the purpose of the link. They will not know whether or not the link is of value to them or not. In these situations users don’t bother clicking, and that’s bad news for you.
  2. Search engines will associate these non-descriptive, irrelevant words as keywords for the link. This means that when people search for keywords you are hoping to capture, they will not see your link.
  3. There is no cross-site SEO benefit. If you are linking to a friend’s website, or if they are linking to you, there will be no SEO benefit, again because the keywords associated with the link/site are irrelevant.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this point. Imagine you own a health club and that you have a unique group fitness class that integrates racquetball into the workout. After creating a page on your website that describes the class and highlights its features, you add a link to your blog that looks something like this:

“Click here to get more information on our newest group fitness class“

When search engine bots crawl your blog page, they will examine all of the links and add them to the search engine index. The bot assumes that the anchor text should be used as the keywords for those links. In our example, the bot will use the words “Click” and “here” as the keywords for your racquetball fitness class page. Whoops, that’s not good…

For better search engine optimization and usability, let’s rearrange our example:

“Looking for a fun way to get fit and learn a new sport? Check out our new Racquetball Fitness Class!“

What we’ve done here is linked to our Racquetball Fitness Class twice: once with the anchor text “get fit and learn a new sport” and once with the anchor text “Racquetball Fitness Class”. Our friendly search engine bots will now associate these important keywords with the page: “fit”, “learn”, “sport”, “Racquetball”, “Fitness”, and “Class”. When a person searches for any combination of these terms, you will drastically increase the probability of your page showing high in the results! In addition, this helps our users to understand exactly where they are going when they click the link.

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Comments

4 Responses to “SEO Tip: Please Don’t Click Here”

  1. V. Neely on July 4th, 2007 6:11 pm

    Great point. I hadn’t thought about it from the SEO standpoint, but it makes sense. And anyway, I like seeing another good argument against using “click here” as a link.

  2. Elliott Cross on July 5th, 2007 6:55 pm

    Another great article! I found your site from the OINK-PUG listings, and this is an excellent resource!

    The old “click here” is an overused misunderstood method of linking to other areas of a site, or external sites. I agree completely that it definately helps with SEO, but more importantly, it provides accessibility to any site for the users. Screen readers and text-only browsers love descriptions, hence things such as alt text.

    Keep up the great articles!

  3. SEO Studio Melbourne on February 13th, 2008 6:49 am

    I just found this article (a bit late, huh?) but I loved it. Very nice and clear.

  4. UK SEO Services on March 3rd, 2008 6:24 pm

    Thats a great explanation for the need to correctly use anchor-text. Many thanks!

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