Anchor text, the clickable words in a link, tells search engines what the linked page is about. Generic "click here" links, missing anchor text, and using the same phrase everywhere all waste that signal. Here's how to link with intent.
When you link to a page, the words you use describe it to search engines. Descriptive anchor text helps the target page rank for the right terms; vague anchor text throws that opportunity away.
Internal anchor text is one of the few ranking levers entirely under your control, you decide the words. A link reading "broken link checker" reinforces that the target is about broken-link checking; a link reading "click here" reinforces nothing. Across hundreds of internal links, this adds up to a clear or a muddy signal about what each page is for. The checks below cover the three ways anchor text goes wrong.
Each wastes the topical signal a link could be sending.
Some links have no readable text at all, an image-only link with no alt text, or a bare icon. Search engines (and screen readers) get nothing to describe the destination. The audit flags links with no anchor text, including bare URL links such as raw DOIs or citation links. The fix is to give every meaningful link descriptive text, or for image links, descriptive alt text.
"Click here", "read more", "this page", "learn more", these describe the action, not the destination. They pass no topical signal and hurt accessibility. Replace them with anchor text that names what the linked page is about. You don't need to be robotic about it; natural, descriptive phrasing in the flow of a sentence works best.
If every internal link to a page uses the identical exact-match phrase, the profile looks unnatural and limits the range of terms the page is associated with. The audit flags low anchor-text diversity to a target. The fix is to vary how you link, the primary term, close variations, and natural contextual phrases, the way a human writer naturally would across different articles.
A few habits that make your internal link graph work harder.
Describe the destination, not the action. The anchor should tell a reader (and a crawler) where they'll land. Link from relevant context. An in-content link from a topically related paragraph carries more weight than a generic footer or sidebar link. Point authority where you want it. Link to your most important pages more often, and from your strongest pages, to concentrate ranking authority on the URLs you most want to rank. Vary the phrasing naturally. Don't force the same exact-match keyword every time; mix in variations. And connect related pages so no important page is left an orphan.
Anchor text matters in both directions, but only one of them is yours to decide. You cannot dictate how other sites link to you, and chasing that is largely wasted effort, whereas every internal anchor on your site is a choice you make when you write the sentence.
That makes internal anchor text a reliable, low-effort lever for telling search engines what your pages are about. It costs nothing beyond the discipline of writing a descriptive phrase instead of a vague one, and it compounds across every article you publish.
For internal links, exact-match anchors are generally fine and genuinely useful, so there is no reason to avoid the primary term. The problem starts when the identical keyword is used for every single link to a page: the profile looks unnatural and it limits the range of terms the target page becomes associated with.
Natural variety is both safer and more effective. It is worth noting where the real over-optimisation risk sits, which is manipulative external link building rather than sensible internal linking, so this is a reason to vary your phrasing rather than a reason to be nervous about internal links.
Site-wide navigation and footer links are useful for structure and discovery, and every site needs them. They simply carry less topical weight than a contextual link placed inside relevant body copy, because they appear identically on every page and so say little about any particular one.
They also work against you in one specific way: repeating the same site-wide anchor on every page contributes directly to low anchor-text diversity for the target. Treat in-content links as your primary tool for passing topical signals and authority, and let navigation do the structural job it is good at.
Free to start. Find links with no anchor text, weak anchors and low diversity across your site.
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