Sphinn - Does Telling Someone to “Click Here” Actually Matter?

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Does Telling Someone to “Click Here” Actually Matter?

Went Hot: September 18, 2007 - 5:39 am
Posted By: northrock 656 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.copyblogger.com)
Category: Usability

Brian Clark of Copyblogger walks us through the real meaning of a link and shares a Marketing Sherpa experiment to find out if the wording used in hyperlinks could make a difference in clickthrough rates.

8 Comments

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from Justin-Goldberg 656 days ago #

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[deleted]

from MiriamEllis 656 days ago #

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Hmmm, really interesting debate now going on in the comments of this article at copyblogger. I simply love Brian Clark's writing. His blog is one of my favorite reads. However, I found this post to be somewhat general and I think specifics would have been helpful.

As an SEO, I have a sort of abhorrence of 'click here' as anchor text. I think the best choice for any link you write has got to be what makes most sense for the reader, though. In some cases, that just might be 'click here', but for most links, within content, 'click here' is awkward.

I'm glad this got Sphunn.

Miriam

from g1smd 655 days ago #

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The other post at: http://sphinn.com/story/5853 has more comments, but less votes.

from northrock 655 days ago #

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sorry, this one was posted first:)

from northrock 655 days ago #

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It is a fun and interesting debate and shows you how an old and routine SEO practice can warp the minds of us search-minded folks. At times the "Click Here" is definitely easier for the reader to understand and "should" be used, but we will twist the sentence in all contortions just to have it make sense for the desired anchor text.....not that there's anything wrong with it.... :)

from mpilatow 655 days ago #

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This made me laugh. "This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded."

It's true. Most of us in the search industry can easily identify links and if we want to click on them we will. The majority of internet users are not as savvy and that keyword laden anchor text may not be as easily identifiable to them. I struggle with this when posting on my blog and social media sites outside the tech/search industry. I want to include SEO anchor text but I fear that many of the readers will not get that it is a link they should click.