Anchor Text

Screens where the link exists and its words say nothing were common for a long time. "Click here" and a "learn more" button are the standard examples. Reading top to bottom, the preceding sentence supplies the context, so nothing looks wrong.

It's different for anyone scanning links on their own. Someone listening to a list of links through a screen reader hears "learn more" eight times in a row with no way to tell which goes where. Search engines are in a similar position: they use the words in a link as a clue about what the linked page is about, and "click here" yields nothing.

That's why anchor text gets its own name. Attaching a link means deciding two things, not one — where it goes, and what gets written in that spot.

The words in a link carry the subject of the page being linked to. "Learn more" carries nothing; "on-page checklist" hands over what that page is about.

Four things are worth holding to.

1. Put the destination's subject in the words. Read on their own, they should say where the link goes.
2. Keep it natural inside the sentence. Forcing a target phrase in repeatedly reads badly and search engines recognize the repetition for what it is.
3. Use the same words site-wide for links to the same page. Call one page four different things and what that page is about gets blurry.
4. Keep the length between two or three words and a short phrase. Link a whole paragraph and there's no visible boundary to the link, and the subject widens until it means nothing.

The division of labor with an internal link, which connects to another page on the same site, is worth keeping straight. Where to connect is the internal link's question; what to write on it is anchor text. Settling both at once means doing the work once.

The words in links pointing at you from elsewhere aren't yours to set. So handing over the phrasing you'd like used is part of the job when asking someone for a mention.

"Not 'click here' — link the page title."

The link's words carry no information.

"Same page, four different link texts."

One page is being called several things, which blurs its subject.

"The whole paragraph is a link."

The range is so wide that neither the boundary nor the subject reads.

On the Pagedeck blog, Ravi went through the link text in old posts. "Learn more" and "click here" turned up in more than thirty places, and each became the title of the page it pointed at.

Noa looked at image links in the same pass. A link on a graphic has no anchor text at all, so the image alt takes that role instead.