Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a hyperlink, giving both users and search engines context about what to expect on the linked page. It is part of the HTML link tag and acts as a signal for the thematic classification of the target page, for internal and external links alike.
In practice
Common anchor text types are exact keywords, phrases containing a keyword, brand names, generic wording such as "click here", and bare URLs. For internal linking a natural mix of descriptive, keyword-adjacent wording works better than repeating the same exact phrase — it reads more organically and lowers the risk of being devalued. With backlinks you usually cannot control the anchor text, because the linking page decides it; a conspicuous number of exact-match keyword anchors from external sources counts as a classic spam signal.