Anchor text
The visible, clickable words of a link. Search engines and screen readers both read them as the label for wherever it goes.
See it
What it is
Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a link. Both search engines and screen readers use it as a label for the destination, so 'our 2026 pricing breakdown' tells them something and 'click here' tells them nothing. The usual flavors: exact match (the target page's keyword verbatim), partial match, branded (your company name), naked URL, and generic ('read more', 'this page').
Internal anchors are fully under your control and are the cheapest relevance signal you own: link to your pricing page from body copy with words that describe pricing, not with 'here'. Vary the phrasing naturally across pages instead of pasting one keyword everywhere.
Gotcha: on inbound links, an unnaturally high share of exact-match anchors reads as paid or manipulated, which is precisely what the Penguin-era spam systems were built to spot. Real editorial links come wrapped in brand names, URLs, and messy sentence fragments. Accessibility gotcha too: screen reader users can pull up a list of every link on the page out of context, and a page of eleven 'learn more' links is useless in that list.
Ask AI for it
Audit and rewrite every link in this page's copy so the anchor text describes its destination in 2 to 6 words. Rules: no 'click here', 'read more', 'learn more', or bare URLs; the anchor must make sense read on its own, out of context; vary the phrasing between links that point to the same page instead of repeating one keyword; keep branded and descriptive anchors mixed rather than exact-match everywhere. Return a table of old anchor, new anchor, destination URL, and a one-line reason.