Best Article link "click here" or Anchor Text for back link?

[joecool1972]

Hi all,

I am about to take my massive action for June and write lots of articles; however, I wanted to check whether anyone has any thoughts on the links in your resources box.

More and more I seem to see people with just one link and that it is a "click here" link. Previously people seem to always use anchor text to get backlinks to their site. I am interested to see if people think or whether they have tested whether just having one link saying "click here" back you their site gets more clicks than having anchor text or the full URL of their site.

Personally, I am not to bothered about the anchor text for the back link because I have other ways of getting my keywords in anchor text. However, it would be nice for the extra boost to use my keywords here as well.

That said though sometimes I think the mystery of a "Click Here" for 5 more tips or "Click Here" to learn the secret about how to cure... etc type link will get more clicks.

Has anyone tested this, or what are your view points on it. I want to make sure that my resources box gets as much click throughs as it can.

Many thanks.

[JonStein]

joecool,

There are several schools of thought on this concept, however, I personally use my brand as the link. In other words If I am promoting green widgets, I use the link as such

The author is an expert on green widgets, to get more information visit the green widgets website

As you know using your brand as the link text is better for backlinks and search engine credibility.

Click here was a great 'call to action' phrase back in the old days (I used it on all my links in the 90s) however I feel that it is often overlooked and dismissed today.

If you really want to be creative and try a few different strategies and tests, you may want to use different "call to action phrases"

such as:

Take a moment to Visit Us and find the Green Widgets you need
Login to the authoritative green widgets website
Stop by our site for a detailed overview of Green Widgets

Use a more friendly attitude in your resource, to encourage the clicks.

Incidentally, you also want to PREVIEW your article before you submit, because some article directories do not treat your links prominently. (no highlighted link text, no anchor text color)

That means that your link would be simply:

Take a moment to Visit Us and find the Green Widgets you need

Hard to tell what to click on! In this case you may be better served by using click here

Jon

[Harry Behrens]

I've always used my keword/branding in the anchor text as well. But I can totally take your point that a nice "Click here" could be effective as well, after all 'clicking here' is the literall call to the action you want them to take, right?

It seems a great point to split test... if you go ahead and test/document this you could have a nice WSO on your hands

[cashcow]

I've found that click here works really good still - but you have to test it because it seems to work better on some articles/resource boxes than others. If you want to get in a link with you anchor text, use both like this:

To find out more about (your keyword phrase) and get our free newsletter - click here.

I also have found that using the actual url had a pretty high click rate when compared to using anchor text in a lot of my articles. I was kind of surprised at that but I guess a lot of people "know" that when they see a URL they should click on it.

Lee

[joecool1972]

Thanks everyone there were some things to make me think.

I already started my article writing for the month this morning and I had decided to test two links in my resources box.

One link with my keyword for a backlink and one that is a call to action. However, I will also be testing the straight URL as Lee suggested as I think this might also help with conversions.

But as with anything, you don't know until you test. Thanks again everyone.

[Smokey_Joe]

Hmm, never thought about that in such terms - I'd love to hear about the results of the experiment. Until now, I have always been opting for anchor text links and might want to know if that needs to be reconsidered.

[gadget_man]

I think it depends on what you want from the link. I would use 'Click Here' for driving visitors to the site whilst I would use some keyworks for the text if I was more interested in the link for SEO purposes.