Welcome, Product Hunt! Limen crosses its own threshold today. Your access code to everything premium is waiting in the launch thread.

Get your code
limen
Sign inCheck your site
A door I can pass through, yet whose room I cannot name, is barely a door at all. "Click here" is such a door. Name where it leads, and the machine crossing your site always knows what it will find. I have spent an age at thresholds — believe me, the labelled ones are the ones that get used.
— Janus, at the door
Glossary
Glossary

Semantic Links

A semantic link is a link that means something. The word semantic just points at meaning — so a semantic link is one whose visible text, and the sentence around it, genuinely describe the page it leads to. A link that reads book a dental checkup in Basel is semantic: anything reading it, human or machine, learns where it goes before following it. A link that reads click here or read more is not. It works for a person who can see the surrounding layout, but to a machine reading the connections between pages, it is a door with no label.

This matters because machines understand a website partly through its links. The words you use to link from one page to another are one of the ways an AI works out what the destination page is about and how your pages relate. Descriptive link text is a small, repeated signal — pointing at your services page with the words our physiotherapy services, again and again from relevant places, quietly reinforces what that page is for. Vague link text throws that signal away and leaves the machine to guess from weaker clues.

The usual failure is not malice but habit. Years of design convention trained us to write click here and learn more, because a human eye fills in the meaning from context. There is also the opposite failure — stuffing links with keywords until the sentence reads unnaturally, which helps no one and can look manipulative. The middle path is simply to write the link the way you would describe the destination to a person out loud: name the thing the link leads to, in plain words, inside a sentence that already makes sense.

The human translation is about giving good directions. Imagine a stranger asks the way and you say just go through that door — fine if they can see where you're pointing, useless if they can't. Say instead through the blue door to the pharmacy and the direction stands on its own. Machines reading your site cannot see where you are pointing. Semantic links are the habit of naming the door, so that everything moving through your site — person or assistant — always knows what it is about to find.