What Is Anchor Text?

How Anchor Text Works

Every hyperlink on the web has two parts: a destination, held in the href attribute, and a visible label, sitting between the opening and closing <a> tags. That label is the anchor text. When a person scans a page, the anchor text is what they read before deciding to click. When a search engine crawls the page, the anchor text is one of the clearest plain-language descriptions it gets of the page on the other end of the link.

Google is explicit about this in its own documentation. Anchor text, it says, “tells people and Google something about the page you’re linking to.” It works in both directions. On an internal link, your anchor text helps Google understand and label your own pages as it maps your site. On an external link, your anchor text helps Google understand the third-party page you’re pointing at. Either way, you are supplying context that the search engine folds into how it interprets the destination.

There’s a special case worth knowing early. If a link wraps an image rather than text, there is no visible text to read. Google handles this by using the image’s alt attribute as the anchor text. So on a linked image, your alt text is doing double duty — describing the image for accessibility and standing in as the link label for search engines.

What Makes Anchor Text Good

Google’s guidance boils down to one sentence: “Good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it’s on and to the page it links to.” Unpack that and you get four practical rules.

• Descriptive — the words should describe the destination. “2026 image SEO checklist” tells you exactly where you’re going; “here” tells you nothing.
• Reasonably concise — a few words, not a whole sentence. Google warns against anchor text that is “weirdly long,” cramming a paragraph of detail into one link.
• Relevant — the anchor should fit both the page it sits on and the page it points to, so the link feels earned rather than dropped in.
• Natural — write “as naturally as possible, and resist the urge to cram every keyword” into the link.

Google even hands you a diagnostic: “Try reading only the anchor text (out of context) and check if it’s specific enough to make sense by itself.” If it doesn’t, rewrite it.

Types of Anchor Text

Practitioners classify anchors by how closely they match the target page’s topic. The categories aren’t official Google terms, but they’re a useful vocabulary:

• Exact-match — the anchor is the target’s main keyword verbatim (e.g. “image SEO” linking to an image SEO page).
• Partial-match — the keyword sits inside a longer natural phrase (“our guide to image SEO”).
• Branded — the anchor is a brand name (“Roborank”).
• Naked URL — the anchor is the raw link (“roborank.swatseo.net”).
• Generic — non-descriptive filler like “click here” or “read more.”
• Image — no text at all, so the alt attribute becomes the anchor.

A healthy site uses a mix. A profile of links that all use the identical exact-match phrase looks engineered, because natural linking never produces that uniformity. Vary the wording — different descriptive phrases pointing at the same page read as human, and they also let you describe the target from several useful angles.

Example of Anchor Text

The clearest worked example comes straight from Google’s own link documentation, which contrasts good and bad anchors on the same underlying link. Google’s stated problem cases are the generic ones: it names “Click here,” “Read more,” and “website” as examples of anchor text to avoid, explaining that the fix is to read the link text in isolation and check whether it stands on its own.

Take a real sentence a site might publish: “To learn how we write image descriptions, click here.” Read only the anchor — “click here” — and it is meaningless. A search engine following that link learns nothing about the destination, and a screen-reader user hearing a list of links hears “click here, click here, click here.” Now rewrite it exactly as Google’s guidance implies: “Read our guide to writing image alt text.” The anchor now reads “guide to writing image alt text,” which survives the out-of-context test, describes the destination, stays concise, and is relevant to both pages.

The same documentation adds the image case as its own worked rule: because an image link has no visible text, “Google uses the alt attribute of the img element as anchor text.” So a bare <a><img src="chart.png"></a> with an empty alt gives Google nothing, while <a><img src="chart.png" alt="2025 organic traffic by channel"></a> supplies a real anchor. Google balances this with a warning that applies to all anchor text: keyword stuffing “is a violation of our spam policies,” so the goal is descriptive, not densely optimized. That single before/after pattern — swap “click here” for a description, give linked images a real alt — is the entire craft of anchor text.

Frequently Asked Questions

The Bottom Line

Anchor text is the label you attach to every link, and search engines read those labels to learn what your pages and the pages you cite are about. Spend each one on words that describe the destination, keep them natural and varied rather than stuffed, and remember that an image link borrows its anchor from the alt attribute. Clear labels in, clearer understanding out.