Over the past few years, a trend has begun, and that trend is that more and more people are considering themselves to be experts when it comes to optimizing your website for search engines (SEO).  While there is no doubt that some SEO tips are useful and fairly accurate, truly none of it is confirmed.  Google in particular, but truly all search engines, tend to guard their algorithms to avoid people gaming the system.  Noone truly knows anything for sure, because Google won’t confirm anything.  And on top of that, it is always changing, so SEO tactics are always changing with them. 

What does all this have to do with the title?  Recently, Copyblogger decided to take a look at anchor text, and compare it to using action text.  Click here to read their post.  The idea is that while anchor text may have some benefit with the search engines, it won’t encourage readers to click on the links.  Here is my favorite part of the post:

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 think this serves as an excellent example of people taking Search Engine Optimization to far, and sometimes things that used to be common sense are left behind in the name of Search Engine Optimization.   People are putting to much effort and focus on SEO, and not truly understanding the whole point of a link.

I personally believe it really depends on what your goal is with your link.   Often when I link to someone else’s blog, my goal is to send them traffic.  I typically try to “tease” the article and maybe quote one paragraph in the hopes that others will go check it out.  In my opinion, this would be a good situation to use action text, which are terms like “click here”, “check it out”, etc. in the hope that your outbound links will get clicked.  As Copyblogger points out, studies have shown that people need to be told what to do, and adding action text makes readers more people more statistically likely to take that action. 

Now, I certainly am not saying that you shouldn’t focus on anchor text a bit, just don’t get carried away.  Anchor text definitely has a place.  To me, it seems to be better fit for situations where you are linking internally.   I often don’t necessarily care whether readers click to my older posts or pages, I just want to pass on some link juice to those posts and help boast their PageRank and findability.  I also link internally sometimes as an explanation, so I don’t have to do a full explanation in the post I’m currently writing (such as linking to a post about an acquisition or something). 

Do you only use anchor text, or do you try to mix in action text as well?