SEO glossary
Anchor text
Anchor text is the clickable wording of a link — the words a reader sees and a search engine reads as a description of where the link goes.
It is one of the oldest signals in search and still one of the clearest: a link labelled "keyword research tool" tells Google something about the destination that the URL alone does not. This applies to your internal links as much as to links from other sites, and internal anchors are the ones you fully control.
A natural incoming profile is mostly your brand name, your bare URL, and vague words like "here" and "this article". A profile where most anchors are the commercial phrases you would like to rank for is the signature of bought links, and it is one of the easier patterns to detect.
"Click here" is bad for accessibility rather than for ranking. A screen reader user tabbing through links hears the anchors out of context, so a page of identical "read more" links is unusable. Describe the destination and both problems go away.
Common question
- Should I use exact-match anchor text on internal links?
- Descriptive, yes; identical on every link to the same page, no. Vary it the way a person writing naturally would.
Check this on your own site
- Backlinks
Every individual link, with anchor and quality signals
Definitions are the easy part
The free plan opens every tool with 500 credits and no card, so you can see these numbers on your own site rather than in an example.
Start free