Guide

Anchor text: how to choose the words you link

Anchor text is the visible, clickable part of a link. It is one of the oldest ranking signals there is, and on your own site it is entirely under your control — which makes it the cheapest improvement most websites never make.

What anchor text is, precisely

In the markup, anchor text is whatever sits between the opening and closing tag of a link. Everything a reader can see and click is anchor text; the destination is not.

Two related cases are worth naming, because people forget them:

Image links. If the clickable element is an image, the alt attribute takes the role of anchor text. An image link with an empty alt is a link with no anchor text at all.
Surrounding text. The sentence around the link is not anchor text, but search engines read it too. A vague anchor inside a precise sentence is far less wasteful than a vague anchor inside a vague sentence.

Anchor text does two jobs at once: it tells a person what they will get if they click, and it tells a search engine what the target page is about. When those two pull in different directions, something has gone wrong — and it is almost always the search engine side that was over-served.

The six types, and when each is right

Type	Example	Use it when
Exact match	`anchor text`	Sparingly, and only where the phrase genuinely belongs in the sentence.
Partial match	`choosing anchor text well`	Most of the time. Carries the term plus natural context.
Branded	`Internal Links Manager`	When pointing at a product or company page.
Generic	`read more`, `click here`	Almost never. Says nothing to either audience.
Naked URL	`example.com/guide`	In citations and references, where the address itself is the information.
Image	`alt="link report screen"`	Whenever the clickable element is an image. Never leave the alt empty.

If you take one thing from this table: partial match is the workhorse. It carries the term you care about, reads like something a person wrote, and does not accumulate into a pattern the way exact match does.

Why internal anchors are a different job

Most writing about anchor text is really about backlinks — links other people give you. There you take what you get, and the advice is defensive: watch the ratios, disavow the spam, hope for branded mentions.

Internal anchors invert all of that. You write every single one. That changes the guidance in three ways:

Consistency becomes possible. If twenty pages describe the same target in related wording, that is a coherent signal you built on purpose.
Manipulation becomes easier — and more visible. Because you control every anchor, an unnatural pattern is unambiguously yours. Search engines know this, which is why identical exact-match anchors sitewide read worse internally than externally.
The reader matters more. An internal link asks someone already on your site to keep going. A misleading anchor costs you a session, not just a ranking.

What a good internal anchor looks like

Four tests, in order of how often they catch something:

Could a reader guess the destination with the surrounding sentence hidden? If not, the anchor is too vague. “Read more” fails instantly; “our approach” usually fails too.
Would you have written those words anyway? A link that fits a sentence you were already writing is worth several that were bolted on to carry a keyword.
Is it between two and five words? Single words are often ambiguous — “linking” could mean anything. A full sentence spreads the signal too thin.
Does it repeat an anchor you already used on this page? The first link to a target is the one that counts. The second is for the reader; the third is clutter.

One habit worth adopting: write the sentence first, then decide which part of it becomes the link. Anchors chosen that way almost never fail the four tests. Anchors chosen first, and wrapped in a sentence afterwards, almost always fail at least one.

Over-optimisation: what it actually means

The phrase gets used loosely. Concretely, three things go wrong:

Uniformity. Every link to a page uses the identical phrase. Two hundred pages, two hundred times the same four words. No writer produces that by accident.
Density. A single page carries so many links that the prose stops working. If a paragraph has more coloured text than black, readers stop reading and start avoiding.
Mismatch. The anchor promises something the target does not deliver. This is the one that actually costs money, because it burns trust rather than a ranking.

The fix for all three is the same and it is unglamorous: write for the person clicking. Uniformity disappears when a human phrases each link in context. Density self-corrects when you only link where it helps. Mismatch cannot survive someone asking whether the promise is kept.

Distribution across a whole site

People ask for a target ratio — what percentage should be exact match, what percentage branded. For internal links no credible number exists, and anyone quoting one for your site has not seen it.

A more useful way to look at it: for any page you want to rank, list every internal anchor pointing at it. If the list reads like a set of related phrases a knowledgeable person would use, it is fine. If it reads like a keyword field copy-pasted repeatedly, it is not.

That list is also the fastest audit there is. Screaming Frog, Sitebulb and the Links report in Search Console can all produce it. Most people have never looked at it once.

Keeping it consistent at scale

Everything above assumes a writer weighing each link. That works while you can hold the archive in your head. Past a few hundred pages it stops — not because the advice changes, but because nobody reopens three hundred posts when a new page goes live.

Automation is the usual answer, and the usual implementation is the reason automation has a bad name: replace every occurrence of a term, everywhere, with the identical anchor. That produces uniformity and density in one step — two of the three failure modes above, manufactured deliberately.

What makes the difference is whether the tool can keep the judgement:

Start from the Nth occurrence, so the opening paragraph stays prose and the link appears where a reader is already invested.
Cap links per page, so density never becomes a problem no matter how often a term appears.
Several phrasings per target, so the anchor list stays varied rather than uniform.
Exclude what should never be touched — navigation, quotations, legal pages.

A rule that carries those four constraints is not a shortcut around the craft. It is the craft, written down once instead of repeated three hundred times.

Where this plugin fits. Internal Links Manager holds several keywords per target, so one page can be reached through different phrasings rather than one repeated anchor. The keyword threshold decides from which occurrence linking starts, the per-page limit caps density, and HTML exclusions keep menus, quotes and legal pages out. Anything you linked by hand stays as you wrote it. See the full feature list.

The short version. Partial match is the workhorse. Write the sentence first and choose the link inside it. Two to five words. Never repeat the same anchor twice on one page. And judge the result by reading the list of every anchor pointing at a page — if it looks like something a person wrote, it is right. Next: the complete guide to internal linking.