Why you should never make “Click Here” a link.

As web designers, we see lots of websites and one of the most common mistakes we see is the use of generic phrases for links. Phrases like “click here” of even “link” are used as hyperlinks to other pages and content. While this may seem like it makes sense, it is very damaging to your website’s search engine rankings. While Search Engines spider all of the text of a web page, they pay particular attention to linked text. Text that is used to link to another page or content is called anchor text.

What is anchor text?

The anchor text of a link is simply the text that you see on the page. You can click on anchor text and hover over it. Anchor text shows the actual words associated with a link, while the address of the web page is hidden in the code. Here’s an example:

<a href=”https://www.bigsplashwebdesign.com/tools/seo-glossary.php”>anchor text</a>

And here’s how it looks: anchor text

This anchor text tells the search engines a little bit about the content that they are linking to, so “click here” doesn’t give the search engine spiders much information, leaving them less likely to index the linked content.

Even more importantly, this anchor text is used to credit your website with ranking for keywords, something every website owner wants.  Unfortunately, if your links are using generic phrases as anchor text, your website is missing out on gaining rank for the keywords you really want, like your company’s industry or featured product.

To avoid missing out on the keyword rankings you’re after, replace these generic anchor texts with something more meaningful, particularly if that text can tie into your desired keywords.

(If you are not sure what your desired keywords are, you can contact us for a free keyword analysis.)

For instance, if you have a link with the anchor text of blue-ray player pointing to your website selling blue-ray players, your link will help that website rank a little higher in the search engine results for the keyword “blue-ray player.”  Whereas, if you use “click here” as your link anchor text, it does nothing to help your sales website rank for any keywords, except for maybe the phrase “click here.”

Comments are closed.