How to Write Link Text That Tells People Where They're Going
'Click here' and 'read more' are useless to screen readers and weak for SEO. Here is how to write descriptive links that help everyone.
Reviewed by Jacob Rhinehart for Strelva's co-founder; products and operations lead responsibilities.
Screen-reader users often pull up a list of all the links on a page to navigate quickly. In that list, every link that just says "click here," "read more," or "learn more" is meaningless, because the surrounding sentence is gone. Descriptive link text helps those users, and it helps everyone else skim, while giving search engines a clearer signal about what you are linking to.
What goes wrong
- Vague text: "click here," "read more," "details" tell nobody where the link leads.
- Icon-only links: a link that is just an icon has no text at all.
- Empty links: a linked image with no alt text, or a link with no content, reads as nothing.
Step by step
- Find the offenders. Scan for "click here," "read more," "learn more," "here," and bare icon or image links.
- Describe the destination. Rewrite the visible text to say where the link goes, in a few words: "View our pricing," "Read the full guide to local SEO."
- Fix repeating "read more" links. On a blog list, either link the headline itself or fold the post title into the link so each one is unique.
- Give icon links a name. Add an aria-label to icon-only links describing where they lead.
- Give linked images alt text. A linked image's alt text becomes the link's name, so describe the destination there.
- Re-scan. Confirm no vague or empty links remain.
Why it doubles as SEO
Search engines read link text as a clue to the target page's topic. "Emergency plumbing services" is a far stronger anchor than "click here." Writing for screen-reader users and writing for search engines pull in the same direction here.
Frequently asked
What business owners ask next.
What's wrong with 'click here' if the sentence around it explains the link?
Screen-reader users frequently navigate by a flat list of links with no surrounding sentences. In that list, 'click here' is empty of meaning. Descriptive text works in or out of context.
How do I handle a blog page full of 'Read more' links?
Fix it at the template level rather than post by post. Either make the post headline the clickable link, or include the post title in each 'Read more' link so every one is distinct.
Does link text really affect rankings?
Yes. Anchor text is a signal search engines use to understand the linked page. Descriptive, relevant link text is more useful than generic phrases for both accessibility and SEO.