Expect BestAnchor text is the visible, clickable wording of a link. It looks like a small detail and it is doing two jobs at once: telling search engines what the destination page is about, and telling a human, or a screen reader, what will happen if they click.
Most websites waste it comprehensively.
Why click here is the problem
Open almost any business website and count the links reading click here, read more, learn more or find out more. There will be plenty.
Each of those is a wasted signal. The link is telling Google that the destination page is about the concept of clicking, which it is not. Change it to what the page is actually about and you have improved the destination's chances for free.
It is also an accessibility problem. Screen readers let users pull up a list of every link on a page to navigate quickly. A list reading click here, click here, read more, click here is useless, and the people relying on it are exactly the people least able to work around it.
The fix takes minutes and costs nothing.
Descriptive without being robotic
Good anchors read naturally in the sentence and still describe the destination. Our website maintenance plans is a good anchor. Website maintenance services Poole cheap best is not, and a human reading the sentence will notice.
The test is simple: read the sentence aloud with the link in it. If it sounds like something a person would write, it is fine. If it sounds like it was assembled for a search engine, it was, and that is visible to more than just you.
Where anchor text can do damage
Over-optimisation is a real risk, and it is mostly a problem with external links.
If four hundred sites link to your page and three hundred of them use exactly the same commercial phrase, that pattern did not happen naturally. It is one of the clearest fingerprints of a bought link campaign, and algorithms have been trained on it for years.
A natural profile is messy. It contains the brand name, the bare URL, the page title, vague phrases like this article, and only occasionally the exact commercial term. If your profile is tidier than that, somebody has been buying.
Internal links are different, because you control them and everyone knows you control them. Consistent descriptive anchors internally are expected and helpful. Just avoid using the identical phrase two hundred times, because it starts to look like a template rather than editorial judgement.
The easiest win most sites never take
Internal anchors are entirely within your control, cost nothing to change, and almost nobody audits them.
Go through your highest-traffic pages. Find every generic link. Replace it with wording that describes where it goes. While you are there, check that your important pages are actually being linked to from somewhere other than the navigation, because plenty of service pages sit orphaned with one link in a menu.
That exercise usually takes an afternoon and does more for a mid-sized site than most technical work.
A sensible policy
Write anchors for the person first, check they describe the destination, vary the wording naturally, and never stuff a commercial phrase into a sentence where it does not belong.
If an anchor makes you wince to read aloud, it is wrong for both audiences at once, which is a useful thing about this particular signal: the version that helps search engines and the version that helps people are almost always the same version.
There is one more habit worth adopting. When you link out to another site, the same rules apply, and describing the destination honestly is both a courtesy to your reader and a small signal about the company your page keeps. Linking to a decent source with sensible wording costs you nothing and makes the page more useful.
Our SEO service covers this as part of on-page work, and our link building service explains how we handle the external side without creating the pattern described above.