Click Here for SEO Benefits

One of the most often and misunderstood aspects of linking is the phrase “Click here”. You know you have seen it around the blogosphere, and most people don’t really understand the adverse effects the infamous “Click here” can have on a site.

While the phrase “click here” generally is used to describe the location that an author is referencing in the article, there are several issues that arise that can cause some problems.

The infamous “click here” has a long and sordid past, first appearing in the days of nested tables and dial-up using Windows 3.1 and early versions of Internet Explorer. Ahh, those were the days, weren’t they?

Well, times have changed quite a bit since then. With the blogosphere becoming more and more integrated with links to other relevant information, using the “click here” will not work anymore.

There are four areas where getting away from the old “click here” and using a good descriptive link will help you, and your site visitors.

Backlinks

One of the methods that is widely used and discussed is how to get backlinks to your site. Backlinks provide a great method of driving traffic to your site, which in turn will increase your page rank and help with your SERP’s. So, why is it important to use a good description in a link you provide to another site?

If every site used the generic “click here” to reference an article or information on another site, you and your visitors would be out of luck if they were searching for something in a search. Why? Well, when you use a good descriptive link to another article, the search engine spiders will index the link text and make it more relevant to specific keywords or pages.

This will help drive traffic and increase your search engine placements for those keywords and phrases. I suggest and recommend that if you are going to link to another article written either on your site, or another site, use the title of the article as the link. Let’s take a look at how it can be done.

I like the article by skellie talking about Viral Content that she has written. So if I want to link to it, I could tell you to read more about it, or I could tell you to read more about 12 examples of viral content.

Which way is easier for you to determine what the article is about? What do you think the search engines will see?

Accessibility

Screen readers and other accessible technologies that assist people with disabilities can also benefit from using good descriptive links. Another area that is often overlooked here, however, is using the title attribute to assist with clarifying the link.

While we can see and benefit from a good descriptive link, screenreaders and other technologies need further information because they only look at the structure of the site. They don’t read the page like you and I do, and rely upon the structure of the page to properly let the user know what the information is about.

Adding the title attribute is as easy as putting in the

title="Good description of the link goes in here"

into the link structure.

Usability

When you visit a site, and are really reading an interesting article, usually the author will point out further references, items for sale, or other past articles that might be of interest.

How usable is a site if every link just said “click here”? Not very usable unless each link was incorporated into the content which is descriptive of what the link represented. Let’s take another look at an example (underlines are not links, only examples).

I was reading this great article on how to fillet a fish the other day, you should check it out here.

Not too bad, you at least have an idea that the article you can see is how to fillet a fish. But I think this is better.

I was reading this great article on how to fillet a fish the other day, and found 5 great tips to make it easier.

Better and more descriptive all around.

SEO

The SEO benefit of using a good descriptive link text is relatively easy to describe. If a search engine spider crawls another site that has a link back to an article you wrote on your site, it will index the link. If the nofollow is being used, that isn’t too big of a problem as it has indexed the content of the link.

If you wrote an article on “10 ways to improve your SEO” and the link text has the same text, it will help you by increasing the relevancy of those keywords. Now, if someone goes and searches for 10 ways to improve SEO, guess where you will probably come up?

Still want to use the “click here” now?

In conclusion

There are numerous benefits to using good descriptive link text. SEO, accessibility, backlinks and usability are just a few. It really is up to you to decide if you want to use it on your site. If all bloggers would incorporate the idea of using good descriptive text for their links, all bloggers and sites would see an increase in traffic, page rank and SERP’s, plus numerous other benefits that might be another article for another day.

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