Anchor text

Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. It tells readers where a link goes before they click, and it tells search engines what the destination page is about, which makes it one of the smallest and most underused SEO signals on any site.

What good anchor text looks like

Google's own definition: "Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to." In practice that means the anchor should read like a short answer to "what will I find there?". Linking to a pricing page? "our pricing" beats "here". Linking to a guide? Name the guide's topic.

What to avoid

• Generic anchors: "click here" and "read more" describe nothing, and Google's documentation flags them as exactly that.

• Keyword stuffing: cramming every related keyword into an anchor; Google notes this violates its spam policies.

• Whole sentences as anchors: long anchors dilute the signal and read poorly. Link the few words that name the destination.

• The naked URL: fine in a reference list, wasteful in prose.

Why it compounds

Anchor text is how internal linking transfers meaning, not just authority. When every link to your topic-clusters guide says some variation of "topic clusters", search engines accumulate consistent evidence about what that page should rank for. Fifty vague "learn more" links accumulate nothing.

One habit fixes most of it: write the sentence first, then link the words that already name the destination. If no such words exist in the sentence, the sentence, not the link, is what needs editing.