Anchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link. In the sentence “see how a technical SEO audit is run”, the underlined words are the anchor, and they tell the reader, and search engines, what they will find on the other side.
How anchor text works
In HTML, the anchor is the text placed between the opening <a> tag, which holds the destination address, and the closing </a> tag. In a link reading “annual boiler servicing in Leeds”, those five words are the anchor whatever the address behind them. When a link is an image rather than words, the image’s alt text plays the same role.
Google reads anchor text as a description of the target page written by someone else. If many pages link to a page with wording about boiler servicing, that reinforces what the page covers. Google has used anchors this way since its earliest days, and its own guidance asks site owners to write link text that is descriptive, concise and relevant to the page it points to.
Anchors are usually grouped into types: exact match (the target keyword exactly), partial match (the keyword within a longer phrase), branded (the business name), naked URL (the web address itself) and generic (“this page”, “here”). Each has its place. The mix of types across all the links pointing to a site is its anchor text distribution.
Why it matters
For a UK business, anchor text matters most in the part you fully control: your own internal linking. A service page linked from blog posts with anchors such as “commercial EPC assessments” gives Google a clearer signal than the same page linked as “find out more”. It also helps readers decide whether a link is worth following, which keeps them moving towards an enquiry.
Anchors matter for accessibility too. Screen reader users often pull up a list of all links on a page to navigate. A list reading “click here, click here, read more” is useless; a list of descriptive anchors works as a menu. WCAG asks that the purpose of each link can be worked out from its text or immediate context.
On links from other sites, anchors carry weight but also risk. A profile with too many exact-match anchors looks engineered, because natural links rarely repeat the same commercial phrase.
Common mistakes
- Generic link text such as “click here” or “read more” on internal links, wasting a free relevance signal.
- Repeating the identical keyword-rich phrase in every internal link to a page, which reads oddly and adds nothing after the first few.
- Very long anchors that turn a whole sentence into a link, so the reader cannot tell what the destination is.
- Anchors that promise something the target page does not deliver, such as “prices” linking to a page with no prices.
- Paying for, or requesting, keyword-rich anchors in guest posts and directories, which Google’s spam policies treat as a link scheme.
How to act on it
Crawl your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog and export the internal links with their anchor text. Sort by target page and look for generic anchors on important pages, and for key pages that receive almost no descriptive links. Rewrite anchors in the body copy so they describe the destination in the reader’s words.
For links from other sites, review the anchor report in a backlink tool, but do not try to engineer it. When you earn a mention, let the other site link in its own words; a link that uses your business name is perfectly healthy. Reviewing and rewriting internal anchors is part of the on-page SEO service I run for UK sites, because it is one of the quickest improvements you control entirely.