Writing Blogger

Ever since the dawn of the Internet age a little over a decade ago, the most common prompt to get users to view another page on millions of sites across the Web has been the ubiquitous “click here.” No matter how many Web consultants have railed against them in work for clients large and small, those two words have stubbornly persisted and continue to flourish even today.

There are good reasons you should almost never use them in your link text, however, beyond the simple fact that using “click here” implies an amateurish, 1995-era approach to Web writing.

Web users mostly scan, rather than read, text online

As the volumes of research by Web usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen have demonstrated, most Web users don’t consume online content in the same way as print content like magazines and newspapers. You’ve probably noticed this behavior yourself in your own Web use habits, that your eye tends to dart around pages in search of relevant text or content relating to your interest at the moment.

That means that link text containing “click here” can get overlooked easily by many Web users. Instead, use the page or document title of the content you’re linking to, so that it can be quickly spotted by Web users who have little time to view the content on your pages. You’ll save your users valuable time, and provide them the value they’re looking for by quickly directing them to the content they want to see.

Google rewards link text with terms relevant to user searches

When search engines like Google crawls the Web in search of links to the billions of sites on the Web, they look for a wide range of things we’ll probably never know all about. But we do know that they look for the number of links pointing to a given site, and how relevant those links are to that given site.

When the text in a link uses words that are similar or identical to common user searches on a particular topic, search engines like Google consider them highly relevant links, and rank them accordingly. That makes it critical for you to use link text within your site that gives Google the right “clue” for the content you’re linking to — which means using the page title in your link text rather than “click here.”

Relevant link text makes you look more professional

If nothing else, taking the time to write informative, search-relevant link text gives the impression that you have taken the time to consider the needs and wants of users, rather than casually and hastily slapping your Web content into your site without giving it a second thought. It adds to your site’s credibility, a commodity that’s in rare supply across much of the Web.

Back to the “almost” part…

Now, I know as well as you do that occasionally, we all lapse into writing habits that are less than optimal and that you’re going to have terms like “click here” slip into your content here and there. No need to panic.

Just be sure to minimize its use whenever and wherever you can, so you don’t have to scratch your head and wonder what “click here” links to.