Anchor Text

Anchor text is a description of the target written by whoever made the link. Engines have used it as a relevance signal since the beginning, because it is a third party stating what a page is about in their own words rather than the page making a claim about itself.

For internal links this is a free labelling system that most sites waste on "click here", "read more" and bare URLs. Descriptive anchors cost nothing extra and are also the accessible option, since screen reader users routinely navigate by pulling up a list of links with no surrounding sentence to disambiguate them.

Exact-match anchors can be overdone. A natural profile varies — sometimes the term, sometimes the page title, sometimes a phrase from the sentence — and a site where every internal link to a page uses the identical keyword phrase reads as engineered rather than editorial.