WordPress Anchor Text Best Practices (With Examples)

Anchor text is the clickable part of a link — the words a reader sees and a search engine reads. It’s a small piece of every post, and it quietly does two jobs at once: it tells a human what they’ll get if they click, and it tells Google what the destination page is about. Get it right and your links feel obvious and useful. Get it wrong and you end up with a page full of “click here” and “read more” that helps nobody, or a page stuffed with the same keyword phrase over and over that looks like you’re trying too hard.

This guide covers the practical side of anchor text best practices in WordPress: the types of anchors, when each one is appropriate, where over-optimization actually matters (it’s not where most people think), how to write anchors that read naturally, and the accessibility angle that almost every SEO post skips. Examples throughout, because anchor text is one of those topics where a table beats three paragraphs of theory.

What anchor text is, and why it matters

In HTML, a link looks like <a href="/wordpress-caching/">WordPress caching plugins</a>. The words WordPress caching plugins are the anchor text. In the WordPress block editor you rarely touch the HTML — you select some words, press Ctrl/Cmd + K, and paste a URL — but the words you happened to select become the anchor.

Two reasons to be deliberate about that selection:

• Readers scan links. Links are visually distinct, so eyes jump to them. A descriptive anchor lets someone decide whether to click without re-reading the sentence around it.
• Search engines use anchors as context. Anchor text has been a ranking signal since Google’s original PageRank paper. It’s one of the clearest hints a search engine gets about what a linked page covers — especially useful for pages with thin on-page text, like a product page or a PDF.

The practical upshot: anchor text is free context. You’re going to write the link anyway; choosing five useful words instead of the word “here” costs nothing.

The anchor text types (with examples)

Most guides list six or seven anchor “types.” They’re not rules handed down by Google — they’re just a vocabulary for describing what the link text does. Here’s the set, with examples for a fictional target page about WordPress backup plugins.

If you take one thing from that table: partial-match anchors should be the bulk of your links. They’re descriptive, they contain the relevant words, and they read like something a person actually wrote.

A note on image links

When a link wraps an image and contains no text, the image’s alt attribute becomes the anchor text. That means a linked screenshot with alt="" is, functionally, a link with no anchor at all — a screen reader will announce the raw URL, and search engines get nothing. If an image is purely decorative, don’t wrap it in a link. If it is a link, give it alt text that describes the destination, not just the picture.

Over-optimization: honest guidance

You’ll read a lot of scary advice about exact-match anchors triggering penalties. Here’s the honest version.

Google’s spam systems have, since the Penguin update in 2012, been good at spotting unnatural anchor patterns — specifically, sites whose inbound links all use the same commercial keyword phrase. If two hundred unrelated blogs link to your page with the anchor “cheap car insurance quotes,” that pattern didn’t happen organically. That’s the manipulation signal, and it’s about link building.

This matters far more for external/backlink anchors than for internal ones. Internal links are anchors you control on your own site — Google knows that, and it treats them as a navigational and structural signal rather than a vote from a third party. Nobody is getting penalized because their internal links to a pillar page all say “WordPress backup plugins.” At worst, over-uniform internal anchors are a wasted opportunity: varying them (“restoring a WordPress site from backup,” “scheduling automatic backups”) gives search engines more angles on the same page and gives readers more reasons to click.

So the practical rule is asymmetric:

• Internal links: optimize freely, but vary anchors for the reader’s sake, not out of fear. Write what fits the sentence.
• External links you build or influence (guest posts, directories, partner sites, anything paid): keep anchors mostly branded, naked-URL, or natural-phrase. A run of identical commercial exact-match anchors from sites you influenced is the pattern that gets flagged.
• Sponsored or affiliate links: the anchor is the least of it — mark them correctly with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". We covered the mechanics of that in our guide to adding nofollow links in WordPress.

Writing anchors that read naturally

The test we use: read the sentence out loud with the link styling removed. If it still sounds like a normal sentence, the anchor is fine. If it sounds like someone shoehorned a search query into it, rewrite it.

Some before/after pairs:

• ❌ “For more information on wordpress backup plugin free, click here.” → ✅ “We compared seven free WordPress backup plugins and ranked them by restore speed.”
• ❌ “Read our guide here.” → ✅ “Our guide to restoring a site from a corrupted backup walks through the whole process.”
• ❌ “https://example.com/blog/wordpress-backup-plugins-compared-2026/” mid-paragraph → ✅ “our 2026 backup plugin comparison“

Two more habits worth building:

• Make anchors unique per destination within a page. If a single post links to the same URL three times with three different anchors, that’s fine — but two different destinations sharing the identical anchor text on one page is genuinely confusing.
• Front-load the meaningful words. “Backup plugin comparison” beats “our comparison of the plugins” because the first two words already tell the reader where they’re going.

Accessibility: the reason “click here” is worse than you think

Screen reader users frequently navigate a page by pulling up a list of all links — a shortcut that strips every link out of its surrounding sentence and reads the anchors in sequence. On a page written with generic anchors, that list sounds like: “click here, click here, read more, this post, here, learn more.”

It is completely useless. The same page written with descriptive anchors reads: “free WordPress backup plugins, restoring from a corrupted backup, UpdraftPlus pricing.” That’s a usable table of contents.

This is also why WCAG’s “Link Purpose (In Context)” criterion exists, and why the stronger AAA version asks that link purpose be clear from the link text alone. Conveniently, the anchor text that’s best for accessibility is the same anchor text that’s best for search engines — descriptive, specific, self-contained. You don’t have to choose.

Two related details: don’t use the same anchor text for two different URLs (a screen reader user hearing “pricing” twice can’t tell them apart), and if a link opens a PDF or a new tab, say so in or beside the anchor.

Internal vs external anchors

Beyond the over-optimization asymmetry above, the two link types call for slightly different instincts.

Internal anchors are how you communicate site structure. If you’re building topic clusters, the anchors pointing from supporting posts up to the pillar page are doing real work — they’re the labels on your site’s internal map. Keeping those consistent is part of why topic clusters and content hubs work at all: the hub page accumulates a set of related, descriptive anchors that collectively describe its scope.

Keeping anchors consistent gets genuinely hard once an archive passes a few hundred posts — you can’t remember how you phrased the link to your pillar page eighteen months ago. Auto-linking rules solve this by letting you define an anchor phrase once and apply it site-wide, which is one of the things our own free plugin JnK Linkweave does (disclosure: it’s ours). Plenty of tools in the internal linking plugin category offer some version of the same rule-based approach — the value is the consistency, not any particular vendor.

External anchors are mostly about being a good citizen. When you cite a source, branded anchors (“according to Ahrefs’ study on anchor text“) are clear and attribute properly. Naked URLs are fine in documentation and reference lists. And when linking out to a competitor or a tool you don’t control, resist the urge to bury it in a vague anchor — a clear anchor makes your page more trustworthy, not less.

The do / don’t checklist

Do:

• Write anchors that make sense read out of context, on their own
• Default to partial-match: topic words plus natural phrasing
• Vary anchors across multiple links to the same page
• Give linked images alt text describing the destination
• Keep anchors roughly 2–6 words — long enough to be specific, short enough to scan
• Mark sponsored and affiliate links with the right rel value
• Audit anchors when you rename or merge posts, so they still describe the new target

Don’t:

• Use “click here,” “read more,” or “this” as the entire anchor
• Link a whole paragraph or sentence when a phrase will do
• Reuse one anchor for two different destinations on the same page
• Build identical exact-match commercial anchors from external sites you influence
• Link the same URL five times in one post — pick the best placement
• Bury a naked URL mid-paragraph where it wraps awkwardly on mobile
• Auto-link so aggressively that ordinary sentences turn blue

A quick audit you can run today

Open your three highest-traffic posts and read only the links. If any anchor doesn’t tell you where it goes, rewrite it. Then search your site for the literal string “click here” — most WordPress search or a database query for >click here< will turn up the offenders fast. That fifteen-minute pass usually catches more than a month of theorizing.

Related reading

• How many internal links per post — the count question that pairs with the wording question

Frequently asked questions

What is the ideal anchor text length?

Roughly two to six words. That’s long enough to describe the destination specifically and short enough for a reader to scan without losing the sentence. Single-word anchors are often too vague, and anchors that run a full sentence make the paragraph hard to read. There is no length that Google penalizes — this is a readability guideline, not a ranking rule.

Can exact-match anchor text hurt my rankings?

For internal links, essentially no — Google knows you control your own site’s anchors and treats them as a structural signal. The real risk is with external links you build or influence: a large number of unrelated sites all linking to you with the same commercial keyword phrase is the unnatural pattern Google’s spam systems look for. Keep built external anchors mostly branded or natural-phrase.

Does anchor text matter for accessibility?

Yes, a lot. Screen reader users often navigate by pulling up a list of all links on a page, which strips each link out of its sentence. A page full of “click here” and “read more” produces a useless list, while descriptive anchors produce something closer to a table of contents. Helpfully, the anchor text that is best for accessibility is also the best for search engines.