Internal Anchor Text: Why 'Click Here' Tells Search Engines Nothing

Read the sentence "To learn more about our pricing, click here." Now imagine you could only see the linked words. All you'd get is "click here". A search engine sees it much the same way. The anchor text is its main clue about what the destination page is about, and "click here" gives it nothing.

Internal links are the one signal you fully control, which makes weak anchors a waste.

What good anchor text does

• Tells readers where they're going before they click
• Gives search engines context about the target page's topic
• Helps screen reader users, who often browse a list of links on their own
• Makes site structure clearer when many pages use consistent wording

Patterns that cause trouble

Step 1: export your internal links

A crawler can export every internal link along with its anchor text and destination. Screaming Frog calls this "All Inlinks". You'll get a long table, but it's easy to filter.

Step 2: sort and scan

1. Filter for common generic phrases and count them.
2. Sort by destination page. Do your most important pages have descriptive anchors pointing at them?
3. Look for a single anchor phrase used for multiple destinations. This confuses the meaning.
4. Check image links for empty alt attributes.

Step 3: rewrite in context

Rewrite the sentence so the link text is part of the natural wording. Instead of "Read more about our SEO audit process here", write "Our SEO audit process covers crawling, indexing and content checks". The words that describe the page become the link.

A few quick guidelines:

• Aim for two to six words.
• Describe the destination, not the action.
• Keep it different from other links on the page where destinations differ.
• Use the page's real topic. If the page is about the orphan pages problem, say so.

Step 4: fix templates, not just posts

Menus, buttons, related-post blocks and footers repeat across the whole site. A "Read more" button in a blog template might appear on every archive page. Change the template once and you improve hundreds of links. A screen-reader-only label like "Read more about [post title]" is a tidy fix for button-style links.

Step 5: keep it varied and natural

If every link to a page uses an identical phrase, it can look mechanical. Mix in some natural variety, such as "our SEO audit checklist" and "the full audit process". Both describe the same page.

Common mistakes

• Replacing every anchor with the target keyword.
• Using very long anchors that wrap across several lines.
• Ignoring navigation and footer links because they're "always there".
• Linking from a generic phrase when a specific one is available in the same sentence.

Good anchors take a few seconds each. Over a whole site, they add up to a clearer map for both people and crawlers.