Anchor text for internal links: pick the words your sentence already says.

Every internal link has two parts you control: where it points, and which words carry it. The second part, the anchor text, is the one people worry about most and get wrong most often, usually in one of two directions. Either it says nothing (“click here”, “this post”) or it says too much, with a keyword pushed into a sentence that was never written to hold it.

The fix for both is the same habit: link the words your sentence already uses to describe the destination. This guide is the detailed version of the anchor text section in our internal linking strategy for blogs: what Google and the available studies say, how to choose the words, and how to check whether your archive follows the habit.

What anchor text is, and what Google says about it

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. In HTML it is whatever sits between <a href=…> and </a>. Google’s SEO starter guide defines it the same way and says link text tells both users and Google something about the page you are linking to.

Google’s more detailed link best practices page is the one worth reading in full. In summary, it says:

• Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to both the page it sits on and the page it points to.
• Test it out of context. Read only the linked words; if they don’t make sense on their own, add more description.
• Anchors can be too long. Google’s own examples mark a sentence-length anchor as worse than a shorter one.
• Write naturally and don’t cram keywords in. The page points to its spam policies, which name keyword stuffing.
• The words around a link matter, and links placed right next to each other lose that surrounding context.
• For an image link, the alt text is the anchor text.
• Internal links deserve the same care, and every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site.

Notice what is missing: no target percentages, no rule that a keyword must appear, no ratio of “exact” to “branded” anchors. Those ideas come from link-building advice about links from other sites, the territory Google’s link spam policy is mostly written for. For an internal link, Google’s guidance comes down to describing the destination honestly, in words a person would use.

John Mueller of Google has put the internal case plainly. In a 2021 office-hours answer, reported by Search Engine Journal, he said that with internal links “you’re giving us a signal of context”, and that the words you would naturally use for users are what you would use as the anchor text. Asked whether the content around a link matters, he said the anchor text is usually “the most important part”. That sits slightly apart from the link best practices page, which also stresses the surrounding words. The reasonable reading is that the anchor carries most of the signal and the sentence supports it, so get the anchor right first.

The six kinds of anchor

Most anchors fall into one of six kinds. They are not good and bad categories; each has a place, but they are not equally useful inside a post.

On a healthy archive, most body anchors end up partial-match or descriptive phrases, with exact-match appearing where the sentence happens to use the page’s main phrase. That mix is not a target to engineer. It is what you get when you link the words that are already there.

For a sense of what real sites do, LinkStorm, a link-tool vendor, analysed 2.5 million in-content internal links on 1,700 of its customers’ sites, with menus, sidebars and footers stripped out. About 81% of anchors were keyword-rich, about 15% were generic phrases like “read more”, and about 3% were naked URLs. Treat it as a snapshot of sites already using a linking tool, not a benchmark to hit: one link in seven saying nothing about its destination is still a lot of wasted links.

If you want the long version of the exact-match question, the guide to exact-match anchors and over-optimisation covers when repetition starts to read as over-optimised.

Choose words from the sentence you already wrote

The most useful anchor text rule is not about the anchor at all. It is about where you place the link. Find the sentence in the source post where the destination’s subject already comes up, and link the words in that sentence that name it. If no sentence names it, the post is probably the wrong source, or the link belongs somewhere else in it.

Here is what that looks like on a travel blog linking to a post about rail passes:

The first version adds a sentence that exists only to hold a link, and the anchor is a search query, not a phrase. The second links a phrase the writer would have typed anyway, at the moment a reader is wondering whether the pass is worth it.

The same move works in any niche. A few more rewrites:

Two things happen in every “after” column. The anchor names the destination specifically enough that you could guess its title. And the sentence around it explains why a reader would follow it, which is the part a bolted-on link never has.

Length, and the words around the link

Length

There is no official word count, but Google’s example is clear that a whole sentence as a link is worse than a phrase. Two to five words covers most good internal anchors. One word is often too vague (“tents”, “budgeting”); eight or more starts to swallow the sentence and makes it unclear which part is the label.

Real sites lean short. In the LinkStorm sample described above, about 61% of in-content anchors had one to three meaningful words, while about 14% ran to eleven words or more, which is sentence territory. The same study found that 28% of anchors shared no words at all with the title of the page they pointed to. Word overlap is a crude measure (“a rail pass” and “Japan Rail Pass guide” overlap; “getting around Japan cheaply” does not, though it may be a fine anchor), but a link with nothing in common with its destination is worth a second look.

A quick test: could the anchor be the title of a section on the destination page? “Feeding a rye starter” could. “Feed it” could not. “If your starter smells like nail polish remover you should feed it twice a day for a week” is a paragraph, not a label.

The words around the link

Search engines and readers both read a link in its sentence. “The grout cleaner we tested took the mould off without bleaching the tiles” says more than “grout cleaner” alone: it tells you the destination is a test, about mould, with a result. That surrounding text is also why lists of links under “Related” say so little; they have no sentence.

Google’s link guidance makes a related point about spacing: don’t place links right next to each other, because each one loses its context and readers can’t tell them apart. In practice, one link per sentence and rarely more than one per short paragraph keeps every link legible. How many links a post should carry in total is its own question, covered in how many internal links per page.

Consistency, variety and what the studies show

Say twenty posts on a recipe site link to the same guide to laminated dough. Should all twenty anchors match? No, but they shouldn’t wander either. Aim for anchors that agree on the topic and vary in the wording.

The varied set describes the destination more fully than the uniform one: it covers the technique, the steps and a common problem. That is exactly what you get for free when every link uses its own sentence’s words.

What the studies show, and why it is not settled

The largest public look at internal anchors is Zyppy’s study of 23 million internal links across 1,800 sites, matched against Search Console clicks. Cyrus Shepard found that pages receiving links with more anchor text variations tended to get more Google traffic, and that pages with at least one exact-match internal anchor had at least five times the traffic of pages with none. He is explicit that it is mostly a correlation study: popular pages attract more links, and more varied ones, for reasons that have nothing to do with ranking.

Zyppy’s later 50-site case study of recent Google updates points the other way. Sites that lost traffic were likelier to have more anchor text variations per page than sites that gained. Shepard flags the very small sample, says these are not ranking factors, and says he does not know why it happened. Put the two together and the honest conclusion is that nobody has shown variety, or exact matching, causing rankings either way.

That is why this guide does not set a mix to aim for. The decision rule that holds up under both readings: use the destination’s main phrase when the sentence naturally contains it, use the sentence’s own words when it does not, and never add or twist words to change the ratio.

The reverse problem matters more. If the same phrase links to different pages across your site, say “sinking funds” pointing at three different posts, you are telling readers and search engines that three pages answer the same question. That is often a sign of posts competing for one query, known as keyword cannibalization; the guide to keyword cannibalization in WordPress explains how to pick one and point the links there.

Anchors in menus versus anchors in posts

Menus, footers, breadcrumbs and sidebars use anchors too. These navigational links follow different rules because they repeat on every page.

• Navigation anchors should be short and predictable. “Recipes”, “Pricing”, “Help centre”, “Tents”. A reader scans a menu for a label they recognise; a descriptive sentence there would slow them down.
• They should match the destination’s heading. If the menu says “Guides” and the page is titled “Resources”, readers wonder whether they landed in the right place.
• Don’t stuff them. A footer with forty links like “emergency plumber Croydon”, “emergency plumber Sutton” and so on reads as over-optimised and helps nobody find anything. A single “Areas we cover” page with a sentence per area is better for readers and is where those anchors belong.

Body anchors, the contextual links, carry the descriptive weight. A menu link to “Tents” is identical on every page, so it says nothing about any one page’s relationship to the tent category. A sentence in a post about wild camping in the rain that links “a tent with a separate inner” says a lot. That difference is the subject of the guide to contextual vs navigational links.

Image links and alt text

When an image is the link, its alt attribute is the anchor text. Google’s link best practices page, linked above, says so directly, and marks a linked image with empty alt text as bad. It is also the label a screen reader announces.

That changes what the alt text should say. For a decorative or informative image that is not linked, alt describes the picture. For a linked image, it should describe where the link goes:

If an image and a text link sit side by side and go to the same place, as on many product cards and recipe grids, the cleanest pattern is one link that wraps both, or a text link plus an image marked as decorative (alt="") and left unlinked. Two adjacent links to the same page mean a screen reader announces the destination twice.

Setting it in the WordPress block editor

1. Select the Image block and use Link in the block toolbar. Search for the post or page by title, or paste its address.
2. Open the block settings sidebar (the Settings button next to Save or Publish), stay on the Content tab and fill in Alternative text with words that describe the destination.
3. Know which alt text you are editing. According to WordPress’s Image block documentation, alt text set in the block applies only to that post, while alt text set in the Media Library becomes the default wherever the image is inserted later. For a linked image, set it in the block.
4. Use Mark as decorative only for an unlinked image that adds nothing. A linked image is never decorative, because it is doing the job of a link.

Accessibility: links read out of context

Screen readers let people pull up a list of every link on a page and jump straight to one. In that list, each link is heard without its sentence. A page whose links are “click here”, “here” and “read more” becomes a list of identical, meaningless items.

This is formalised in WCAG success criterion 2.4.4, Link Purpose (In Context), a Level A requirement: the purpose of each link must be clear from its text, or from its text together with its programmatically determined context, such as the rest of the sentence or list item it sits in. W3C’s guidance notes that link text which is as meaningful as possible helps people choosing from a list of links, and that context before a link is more useful than context after it, because that is the order a screen reader reaches it.

The practical upshot lines up with SEO advice almost exactly: descriptive anchors pass both tests at once, and “click here” fails both. Two smaller points that are easy to miss:

• Same words, same destination. If “pricing” appears twice on a page, both should go to the same place. Two identical anchors that go to different pages are confusing in a links list.
• Don’t rely on the title attribute to explain a vague link. WordPress’s own documentation notes that many devices and browsers don’t display it, and on a phone there is no hover to reveal it. Put the meaning in the visible text.

Common anchor text mistakes

• “Click here” and its cousins. “Here”, “this post”, “read more”, “this link”. Move the link onto the words that describe the destination; the sentence usually needs no other change.
• Whole-sentence anchors. Linking all of “Our complete step-by-step guide to fixing a dripping kitchen tap without calling a plumber” makes the label vague and the paragraph hard to scan. Link “fixing a dripping tap”.
• The same words linking to different pages. “Budget template” going to a spreadsheet post on one page and a printable on another. Pick the page that best answers the phrase and use different words for the other.
• Linking your own keyphrase away from the page. If a post about rye bread links the words “rye bread” to a different post, it hands its own topic to another page. Yoast SEO Premium has a competing links check that warns about exactly this when an anchor contains the post’s focus keyphrase. If you are weighing it up, here is how Yoast’s internal linking tools compare with Silotree.
• Keyword sentences. Anchors written as search queries (“best hiking boots for women 2026 review”) inside sentences that don’t read naturally. If you wouldn’t say it aloud, don’t link it.
• Naked URLs in body text. “See example.com/tents/two-person” is readable but tells a screen reader user a string of characters. Use words.
• Anchor text that promises the wrong page. “How to repot an orchid” linking to a general houseplant category. The reader feels misled and leaves. Anchors are a promise; link to the page that keeps it.
• Linking the same anchor several times in one post. The second and third links add clutter, not meaning. Once is usually enough.

A 30-minute anchor text audit

You don’t need to read every post to know whether your anchors are healthy. This routine takes about half an hour on a site of a few hundred posts and finds most of the problems worth fixing.

1. Export every internal link with its anchor and destination.

   Any crawler that reports inlinks will do. The anchor text analyzer checks the link text on a page for you if you would rather start with a handful of important posts.

2. Filter out the template links.

   Menus, footers and sidebars repeat on every page and will drown the body links. Screaming Frog, for example, tags each link with a link position (Navigation, Header, Aside, Footer or Content) and includes it in Bulk Export › Links › All Inlinks, in the free version too, up to 500 URLs. Keep only the Content rows.

3. Search the anchors for the generic list.

   click here, here, read more, this post, this article, link, more. Every hit is a link to move onto better words.

4. Sort by anchor and look for one phrase pointing at several pages.

   Each one is either a wording fix or a sign of two posts competing for the same topic.

5. Sort by destination and read the anchors for your ten most important pages.

   Do they agree on what the page is about? Are they all identical? Is any of them vague or misleading?

6. Flag anchors longer than about eight words.

   Shorten each to the phrase that names the destination.

7. Check linked images for empty or descriptive-only alt text.

   Start with your theme’s archive cards, since one fix there covers every post.

8. Fix the worst ten, then put the rest on your weekly list.

   Anchor fixes are small edits. Five a week alongside your other linking work is 65 in a quarter, which is more than most sites have ever reviewed.

Changing an anchor in the block editor

Fixing a weak anchor is usually a matter of moving the link a few words along. In the WordPress block editor, as described in WordPress’s link control documentation:

1. Click into the linked text. WordPress shows a link preview with options to edit, remove or copy the link. Copy it, then choose remove.
2. Select the new words, the ones that describe the destination, and press Ctrl+K (⌘+K on a Mac).
3. Paste the address, or start typing the destination post’s title and pick it from the search results, which keeps you from linking an old URL that now redirects.
4. Leave Open in new tab and Mark as nofollow off. Internal links should open in the same tab and be followed.
5. Update the post, then view it once to check the sentence still reads well.

Where Silotree fits

Silotree’s link suggestions follow the rule this guide keeps coming back to: each one is made from a sentence you already wrote in a related post, linking the words that already describe the destination, and you approve or skip every one. It never writes inside headings, captions or buttons, and it keeps to about one link per 100 words. If you just want to see where your site stands first, the free internal link checker crawls your published pages with no account or email.

Questions people ask