"Click here" for basic SEO
Posted on by Steve Workman About 1 min reading time
In the office on Friday, I was talking about web site content, more specifically about links and SEO. I discussed the most basic element of SEO, link text. The link text contains the keywords that Google, Bing, Yahoo et al use to match your search query to their web site. The more links to a page with the same keywords, the higher up the ranks it goes.
So, sounds pretty obvious that you should have searchable keywords in your links. But what do most people do? Well, you mostly see something like "Click here to see..." which to a search engine explains nothing about the target content. If you search Google for "click here", you get 872,000,000 results, most of which point to Adobe Reader!
So, a very simple tip: Don't use "Click here" in your link text.
If your link text matches the content of the <h1> or <h2> tag on the target page, you also get a rank boost as these headings telegraph that the content matches the link, making it a trusted link, rather than just spam or "Google bombing".
It's hard to underestimate how important SEO is for a web site. With billions of pages now floating around the Internet, if you don't appear on the first few pages of Google for your targeted search, for all intents and purposes, you don't exist.