Why use “click here” as anchor text? You don’t have to look far to find an SEO blogger who ardently and passionately argues against using “click here” as anchor text. In fact, you can even click here to see a query where even the W3.org site says “Don’t use ‘click here’ as link anchor text”.
That’s just stupid. Worse, it’s stupidity shored up by snobbery. There is absolutely nothing wrong with telling people to “click here” to see something or do something. Heck, it’s more concise. Why on Earth would you want to strangle the naturality of your Web copy just to avoid saying “click here”? There’s no search optimization reason to avoid using “click here” as anchor text and there are a lot of good reasons to do it.
For example, if you link to the same destination five times on a page, using keyword-rich anchor text all five times is going to look stupid — and most of you believe that only the first link counts anyway, so why are you trying to have it both ways? Give the reader a break and just say “click here”.
And what about those Websites you want to link to but don’t want to pass anchor text to? You can choose to give them some PageRank or to just dissipate it across the Web by using “rel=’nofollow’” but it looks more natural if you just say click here to visit Matt Cutts’ Website. You’re not obligated to give anchor text to everyone you link to.
In fact, telling Web designers and copywriters to use keyword-rich anchor text in every link they create is assinine. Their first priorities should be to use anchors that are meaningful and helpful to their readers. It would be a rare Web designer who would use “click here” as anchor text in a main navigation link, but most people still use “home” as the anchor text for the root URL of their Websites.
Only an SEO would care if someone puts “home” as the anchor text in their main site navigation. But an SEO should NOT care if someone uses “click here” as anchor text on link number 3 for the home page. You’re missing the whole point about search engine optimization if you think it’s all about links and anchor text. It’s not.
You should be forcing yourself to use “click here” as anchor text just to break yourself of the very bad habit of telling people NOT to use it. In fact, I should have saved that item for this year’s 20 Hard Core SEO Tips article. It’s a good one.
Since it is an unwritten law of the universe that only Adobe can ever rank for the expression “click here” you should think of this as good, safe anchor text to use when suggesting that people visit some other Website you don’t hate, are not committed to promoting, and feel safe recommending. That’s a natural way to tell people to do something. If you don’t believe me, just click here to read an article I wrote over 4 years ago about “measuring the quality of a page” (that is WAY pre-Panda, too).
I’m not afraid to tell you to “click here”. The Earth hasn’t destroyed itself. I didn’t lose my rankings. People are still finding SEO Theory articles through search. Nah na nah na nah NAH!
Good search engine optimization has a real reason for advising people NOT to do something. Whenever people ask me if they should or should not do something, one of the first questions I ask is: “What are you trying or hoping to accomplish?” If their answer won’t be affected by whether they use “click here” as an outbound link anchor text, I don’t derail the train by obsessing over something like that.
In fact, I probably spend more time advising people to STOP trying to use keyword-rich anchor text than anything else. I mean, SHEESH! How many times in an article do you really have to sayHuckleberries in link anchor text before people realize you’re trying to promote a Huckleberry Website? So you love to buy Huckleberries — that’s great, but — DAMN — give the keyword-rich anchor text a rest, okay?
“Click here” frees you from the mind-numbing repetition of bad, outdated, simplistic, one-size-fits-all SEOteric monotony that masquerades as good SEO practice. IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT LINKS. You canclick here to see that I am not the only person who uses “click here” in an article.
It’s a fine, safe, sane, useful, HELPFUL, user-friendly practice and people need to get down off their high horses and stop obsessing over nonsense about using “click here” as anchor text. I can use “click here” to send people to any destination I want. You can’t stop me from doing that and you can’t stop them from clicking on the links and going where I send them. You’re lucky if you can stop yourself from clicking on them just to see what I’m trying to show people.
You got a problem with that? Then just click here and get outta my article!
