“Click Here” vs. SEO: Clark 1, Miller 0

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 18 of September , 2007 at 1:26 pm

I’m not a big fan of WebProNews. This article by Jason Lee Miller is the reason why.

I’m just going to jump right to the middle of the cheese:

So – not to sound too condescending or anything – instead of expecting whichever visiting human’s synapses to fire in the right way to interpret that an article about bears highlighted in link-format is a link to that article, said synaptic misfiring human may actually need a “Click here to read about bears.”

To make his point, Miller uses “article about bears” and “click here” as the anchor text for two links that point to www.bears.org. He is clearly setting us up for his disagreement with blogger Brian Clark, who said this in a recent blog post at Copyblogger:

Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.

I’d already read Clark’s blog post and I agree with him. Anchor text is certainly a value I place highly on copy writing for blogs and websites. But your website and blog should sell as well. You want people to click on the links buy what you are selling. If it can be proven that people will click more often when the text says “click here” versus “mumbo jumbo” then it just makes good sense to use the phrase “click here.” Seems reasonable enough, doesn’t it?

Well, not for Miller. He continues:

From an SEO standpoint, this is terrible. You’ve just optimized “click here,” which is useless in search, instead of “bears,” which is not.

Well, obviously, SEO isn’t everything. Sure, you lose the SEO benefit of the anchor text, but if more people click on the “click here” link then you’d be a fool to go for the anchor text. It is imperative to keep in mind the purpose for any technique that you use. Anchor text is necessary to get that extra Google juice, but all that does for you is increase your chances of moving up in search engine positioning. Perhaps you’ll get more traffic from that. But traffic is unconverted until you close the sale. If “click here” closes the sell then that’s a higher value than being No. 5 on page 1 versus being No. 6.

I haven’t done a test to see if people click more on “click here” text versus other wording. I can’t vouch for that. But according to Brian Clark, Marketing Sherpa has done a study and found out some rather interesting data (I haven’t seen the study either). Here are the results, according to hearsay from Clark:

• “Click to continue”: 8.53%
• “Continue to article”: 3.3%
• “Read more”: (-)1.8%

It does make sense when he explains it. I would say that SEO is good and you should always keep it in mind, but don’t focus on SEO so much that you lose the sale. After all, your bottom line is always much more important than some mere ranking according to a faceless algorithm.

Affordable Internet Marketing Services, including SEO, Pay Per Click, Blog Marketing & More! For More Info Call Expert Nick Stamoulis at: 877-295-0620.

Receive Updates For The Search Engine Optimization Journal

Category: SEO

• Add this post to Del.icio.us - Digg