Anchor text: The visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines and readers both use them to judge what the page on the other end is about before they get there.
Why the words matter
A link’s words are one of the few places where you describe another page in your own voice, before anyone has seen it. Google’s link guidance asks for anchor text that is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages, and gives “click here” as its example of text that is too generic. Readers use the same cue: a link that says “how long to rest a brisket” gets clicked by people who want exactly that.
The surrounding sentence matters too. Compare “I covered this here” with “before you book, check which Lisbon neighbourhoods are walkable from the river”. The second tells everyone what is on the other side, and it is still a natural sentence.
How to check yours
On a WordPress site, a crawler’s inlinks export lists every internal link with its anchor. Pivot it by target page and read down the anchors each page receives. Look for three patterns: generic words (“read more”, “this post”), the same phrase repeated from every post, and one phrase pointing at two different pages. The last one often means two posts are competing for the same search — a case of keyword cannibalization.
Common misconceptions
- “Every anchor should contain the keyword.” Google’s guidance warns against cramming keywords into link text. Zyppy’s correlation study of 23 million internal links found that pages receiving a wider variety of anchors tended to get more search traffic.
- “Exact match is dangerous on internal links.” Repeating it everywhere reads badly; using it sometimes is normal. See exact-match anchors.
The guide to anchor text for internal links covers how to choose the words in practice, with before-and-after examples.