While many SEOs have perfected strategies for internal linking structure for things like the navigation, when it comes to internal links within the actual content, this is an area where SEO best practices for links are often forgotten.  But even these links are important when it comes to the use of anchor text.

The question came up specifically about the importance of keywords within internal links, with regards to linking within content (as opposed to internal navigation links).  It was asked whether using “for more info on SEO updates visit my post” versus “SEO updates” would be better for SEO purposes.

John Mueller from Google commented on the importance of using useful anchor text for internal links as opposed to using something generic like “click here” or “here” instead.

Both of those essentially work for us, so that’s completely fine.  I think what’s important is that you use something like “for more information on this topic” as part of the anchor text rather than just like for more information on this topic and then the link is “click here”, because “click here” really doesn’t tell us a lot.  We can try to figure out a bit more from the context but it is really a lot easier if you actually tell us what the link is.

For those of us doing audits, these types of non-descriptive anchor texts within articles and other types of content is extremely common, unless the links are part of a “related articles” plugin at the end of an article.  But within the article itself, most sites have fairly useless anchor text for these links.

Mueller also comments from a best practices point of view that internally they don’t always follow the best practices in their own help centers or blog posts.

And this is something that we run into as well on our side when I look at our help center or when we write a blog post, we sometimes fall into that trap of it’s really easy to just like say describe something and then have click here as a link anchor and it makes a lot more sense for users and for search engines to have a clean anchor text.

So don’t forget about using useful anchor text for those internal links within content, and try to avoid the non-descriptive anchor text such as “here” or “click here”.