Humor me and I’ll show you something really neat.
1) Go to Google and search: click here
2) Go to Yahoo and search: click here
3) Go to Bing and search: click here
Notice anything? Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Did you look? If you looked, you’ll notice that Adobe Reader is in the top 2. And if not for Bing giving top ranking to Wikipedia, Adobe would have the top spot for “click here” in all the primary search engines. Go Bing.
Here’s the kicker. click here Adobe Acrobat doesn’t use the phrase “click here” on their website. They aren’t “optimized” for the phrase click here. They didn’t even try to rank well for the phrase click here. And yet there they are, pretty much glued to the top of page one.
So why is Adobe ranked in the top for a phrase they aren’t targeting and they aren’t optimized for?
Easy! Adobe is ranked at the top of search engines for the phrase “click here” because roughly 2,459,417 webpages link to Adobe with the phrase “click here.” You know… click here to download Adobe Reader. Because how else can people read your pdf?
Humor me again, this one is about you. Yes, personally. Let’s do a little test.
1) Go to Google and click the “advanced search” link.
2) Type your best keyword into the “exact wording or phrase” line. The one you really want to rank for.
3) Now click the blue link that says “Date, usage and more”
4) Look for the line that says “Where your keywords show up” and select “in links to the page”
5) Click search
The results you see are sites that have incoming links containing your best keyword. The sites with most incoming links that contain the keyword are ranked at the top. Is your site there?
Now let’s go back to the click here silliness.
In Google, the number 2 site is a marketing agency named (ready?) — Click Here. They only have 119 links to their site. So nope, they don’t have 2 million incoming links either. Feel better? But they are optimized for the phrase Click Here. It’s in their title tag, it’s in their meta tags, it’s in their content. Heck, it’s even their domain name. And that’s why they’re on page one of Google. Aggressive on-page optimization.
However, you’ll notice that “Click Here, the Marketing Agency” is not on page one of Yahoo or Bing.
So, the take home lesson is that Adobe is in page 1 of all 3 search engines because lots of people link to them with click here as the linking text. Click Here, the marketing agency, is on page 1 of Google because they optimized their site for the phrase Click Here, but that wasn’t enough for Yahoo or Bing.
