User Experience 101: 'Click Here' links

In the early days of the Web, words like 'click here' were used as cues to direct people within a website. The defence was that users had never seen a link before, and thus didn't really know what to do with it. Thus, the 'click here' was born.

However times have changed now, where the web is (almost, if not already) an everyday tool, and the 'click here' is now implicit. Instead of 'click here', link text should indicate the nature of the link target. Here are a couple of reasons why:

Search Engine Optimization
Google and other search engines pay attention to the textual information that you put in a link and estimate the relevance of a link. They want to know where you are sending people, and will reward you by using keywords in the link.

For example:

1. We provide customer focused and innovative services in Ottawa. Click here.
   
   
2. Customer focused innovative services in Ottawa

The second is a much more powerful option from an SEO point of view.
By improving your hyperlinking scheme, you can increase the % of traffic that flows to your site, and in turn, into your business, just by gaining a couple of points in your conversion rate.

Device-dependent
We are in a time where more devices are becoming web-enabled (GPS, mobile devices, tablets, etc...) Without getting into too much detail, 'click here' is an action using a mouse. Even though users probably recognize what you mean, you are still conveying the message that you think in a device-dependent way. (i.e. When viewing a site on an iPhone, you're actually tapping, not clicking)

I can go on about this subject, but you can read more about it by clicking here...OOPS, I meant, you can read this article! Don't use "click here" as link text by the W3C Quality Assurance