Most people think about backlinks in terms of quantity, how many sites are pointing to theirs. Fewer think about the words being used to link to them. That’s a mistake, because those words carry a relevance signal that affects what you rank for.
This is anchor text. It’s one of the lesser talked parts of SEO, but once you understand how it works, you’ll want to be hyperlinking the proper way.
What is anchor text?
When someone links to your site, that link has two components: the destination URL and the clickable text. The clickable text is the anchor text.
If a blog post says “we covered this in our guide to keyword research” and the words “guide to keyword research” are clickable, that phrase is the anchor text. If it just says “click here,” then “click here” is the anchor text.
One thing worth noting: images can function as links, but they don’t have anchor text in the same way. The alt attribute does some of that work instead, which is part of why writing descriptive alt text matters. These are great when you have a useful infographic/diagram which is shared on social media and other websites, and one of our methods to link building.
Why it matters for rankings
Google ranks pages based on two broad signals: authority and relevance. Authority comes largely from who links to you and how credible those sites are. Relevance, what your page is actually about, comes from a combination of your own content and what external sites say about you when they link to you.
Anchor text is how external sites communicate relevance. If ten well-regarded websites link to your page using the phrase “periodontal disease treatment,” Google gets a clear signal that your page is relevant to that topic, even if those exact words appear sparingly in your own content.
You can influence what you rank for through the language people use when linking to you, not just through what you write on the page.
The old approach, and why it stopped working
In the early days of SEO, this signal was easy to game. If you wanted to rank for anything you’d build a hundred backlinks and make 80% of them use the exact phrase as the anchor text. It worked for a while.
Then Google caught on. Over-optimised anchor text profiles became a penalty trigger. A backlink profile where the vast majority of links use the exact same keyword phrase looks unnatural, because it is. Real sites linking to you organically will use all kinds of different language: your brand name, a sentence fragment, a generic phrase, sometimes nothing more descriptive than “this article.”
This is also how negative SEO works. A competitor can deliberately point a volume of spammy, exact-match anchor text links at your site to make your profile look manipulated. It’s worth being aware of, and it’s one reason to keep an eye on your backlink profile in something like Semrush or Ahrefs. At PrimaryRush, we have not seen this happen often but aware it can happen, and have the tools and solutions to help with it.
What a healthy anchor text profile looks like
Keep exact-match keyword anchor text to somewhere between 5% and 10% of your total backlinks. The rest should look natural, because it should be natural. If you’re above 10%, don’t worry too much it all come back to how natural it is.
A healthy profile has a mix of a few types. Exact match is the specific keyword phrase you’re targeting, used sparingly: “periodontal disease treatment,” “all-on-4 dental implants.” Partial match or contextual phrases wrap the keyword into a longer sentence: “learn more about all-on-4 dental implants” or “we’ve written about periodontal disease treatment in detail.” These pass relevance without looking like someone counted keywords before writing the link. Generic anchors like “click here,” “read more,” or “this article” carry almost no relevance signal on their own, but they’re part of what a natural backlink profile looks like and most of your links will probably fall here. Brand anchors, your business name, your domain, your site name, are completely natural and make up a large chunk of most healthy profiles.
One useful thing to know: even if the anchor text itself is generic, the surrounding paragraph still passes some relevance. If a sentence says “for more on gum disease treatment, click here” and links to your page, the phrase “gum disease treatment” in that sentence still gives Google some context about what the link is pointing to. Anchor text is the stronger signal, but it’s not the only one.
How Google uses anchor text to build sitelinks and in-page links
This is where anchor text goes beyond backlinks and affects how Google presents your site in search results.
Google builds sitelinks, those additional links that appear beneath your main result for branded searches, partly based on how people link to and reference specific pages on your site. If your “About” page consistently gets referenced as “about PrimaryRush” and your services page gets referenced as “SEO services,” Google picks up on the structure of your site through that language.
The same logic applies to in-page anchor links, the kind that jump to a specific section using a heading ID. When Google indexes a long page with clear internal anchor points, it can surface those directly in search results, showing links to specific sections beneath the main result. You’ve probably seen this on how-to articles or long guides, where Google shows jump-to style links underneath the result.
For this to work, your headings need clear IDs, your page structure needs to be logical, and the content at each anchor point needs to genuinely answer a distinct question. Google is essentially asking: if someone landed directly at this section, would they find what they were looking for?
What this means for how you write links
On your own site, the anchor text you use for internal links follows the same principles. Linking to your services page as “click here” tells Google nothing. Linking to it as “our SEO and content services” tells Google exactly what that page is about.
A few practical habits worth keeping: write descriptive anchor text for internal links, using the topic or keyword the destination page is targeting rather than a generic call to action. When you’re getting external coverage, a press mention, a guest post, a partner page, think about what anchor text would be most useful and suggest it where appropriate. Most people will use whatever’s convenient, and convenient is usually a generic phrase or your brand name. A polite suggestion to use something more descriptive is completely reasonable.
Don’t manufacture an anchor text profile. The goal is a natural distribution that looks like what you’d get if lots of different people linked to you independently, because that’s what Google is comparing it against.
The short version
Anchor text is one of the cleaner signals in SEO. It’s explicit, it’s external, and it directly shapes what your pages are understood to be about. Use “click here” for everything and you’re leaving that signal empty. Use exact-match keywords for everything and you risk an over-optimisation flag. The sweet spot is a natural mix weighted toward brand and contextual phrases, with exact-match used sparingly where it counts.
The same thinking applies to internal links, sitelink structure, and how Google decides which sections of your pages are worth surfacing directly in results. Descriptive language beats generic language. It’s not complicated, just easy to ignore until you understand why it matters.
Want a backlink profile that actually builds rankings?
Anchor text strategy is one piece of a broader SEO picture. If you want to know how your current backlink profile looks and where the gaps are, PrimaryRush can take a look. We work with businesses on SEO built around real signals, not shortcuts. Get in touch.