The demise of “click here” link text

SEO

"Click here" is simply awful for SEO. Every good web marketer knows (or should know, at least) the value of links. Build your links with keywords tied to the page they link to, and Google will love you forever. Or, at least, love you until the folks up in Mountain View change algorithms (Google is a fickle suitor). By linking the text "click here", unless you are linking the article you’re currently reading, your keywords are probably useless.

Accessibility

If you are visually impaired, you are not reading this text in the same way that I am reading this text. You are probably using a screen reader, which can grab hyperlinks from a page and use them as a quick method of navigation. Which becomes pretty useless if a bunch of the links just say "click here" – how are you to have any idea what they actually link to? Make your links as descriptive as possible for screen reader users.

Mobile

"Click here" is desktop centric, and ignores the ever-growing body of mobile viewers who tap with their finger rather than click with their mouse. Seeing a "click here" link on a web page on a mobile device is a subtle suggestion that perhaps the folks who put together that web page weren’t thinking all that much about mobile users when that copy got put together. Forward-thinking companies should consider this when writing their copy and linking between pages.

The phrase "click here" is little more than a relic, a phrase left over from a time when hyperlinks were new to most people. Then, it might not have been very obvious that you were, indeed, meant to click on that link. Now, "click here" is an unnecessary instruction at best, just like dialing a phone.