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

By: » Why “Click Here” Makes Sense In Your Newsletter Search Engine Optimization Journal

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:46:26 +0000

[...] wrote a post yesterday about a Copyblogger blog post and a WebProNews followup that drew a lot of [...]

By: Nick Stamoulis

Nick Stamoulis — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:18:21 +0000

Thanks all for commenting.

Sorry, Brian, I did see the “Click here” and while I was writing the post forgot that it was there. I didn’t click on the link because I had a lot of things to get done and only a short window so I didn’t bother checking the source. Otherwise, I would have. I realized that I did see the link after I had published my post. My apologies.

Kevin, the “click here” we’re discussing is usually the call to action click. I think I’d rather have a strong closing link that sends qualified buyers to my pay page than to have all the traffic in the world that doesn’t convert.

Jason, you are right. It’s best to speak to the humans and the spiders. I like NameCritic’s suggestion. You can do both in one link. I’d be curious to see if anyone has done a study on the effectiveness of that.

By: namecritic

namecritic — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:36:39 +0000

Why not just say, “Click here for more about bears”?

you can do both. You can write for the bots while writing for your human visitors. The bots don’t come before the users. No use bringing people to a website that can’t close sales.

By: Jason Lee Miller

Jason Lee Miller — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 19:00:30 +0000

not that i’m in the habit of commenting on my detractors or anything…but Google alerts for my name and all and i found you

I actually agreed with Brian, and thought he had a good point and was not “clearly” setting anything up for a disagreement…I made some bad jokes and didn’t communicate my point clearly enough perhaps…but actually the suggestion I made was that both things be done, to think about humans and spiders in some kind of balance…so I have to disagree that I disagreed with Brian…all I’m guilty of is bad writing and a little narcissism for having a google alert for my name. Guess I’ll try harder next time.

By: KevinW

KevinW — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:29:29 +0000

The question is, will the traffic generated by good SEO be enough to offset the loss of click-through traffic by using meaningful link text? I think I would rather have good SEO and lower click-through rates than no traffic at all.

By: Brian Clark

Brian Clark — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 17:38:19 +0000

>> according to hearsay from Clark

I linked to the Sherpa article and encouraged everyone to go read it. Maybe “click here” doesn’t work after all.

Actually, I know that’s not true from my own testing over the years. But I don’t understand the SEO viewpoint sometimes… is the goal to get traffic or money?

In copywriting terms, traffic is a feature, and money is the benefit. That’s what commercial website owners who sell things really want, and more SEOs need to understand that.

If the model is ad based, attract all the random search traffic you want. If you’re trying to sell something, you need to think about conversion a bit.