SEO and Web accessibility often overlap. A good example of this is writing good anchor text for every link contained on the website. Do links on your website use appropriate anchor text?
<a href="/some-link">This is the anchor text</a>On the SEO side, search robots will use a link’s anchor text to understand what information might be contained on the linked-to page. This helps ensure the page is appropriately indexed. To help robots, the anchor text needs to be relevant to the linked-to page. It would be natural for the anchor text to include a few keywords. Those keywords would help people and robots know why they should click on the link. However, you want to avoid overly optimizing the keywords used in the anchor text. Search robots are smart enough to catch keywords that sound unnatural. Those types of internal links can start to work against you, hurting your SEO performance.
On the accessibility side, to pass WCAG SC 2.4.4, the “purpose of each link” needs to be “determined from the link text alone” or from the context of nearby content. That means links should use relevant keywords in the anchor text to describe the nature of the page, similar to the SEO guidelines. If somebody only hears or reads the link’s anchor text, that person should know where the link is going to go and why they should click on it. As with SEO, you want to avoid overly optimizing the anchor text because that makes it harder for people to know why they should click on the link (or trust that it is safe to click on the link). As part of meeting this guideline, it is also important to avoid ambiguous anchor text like “click here”. Of course, ambiguous anchor text would be a problem for search robots as well.
So, how are the internal links on your website? Does the anchor text work for both SEO and accessibility? Are there ambiguous or overly optimized links? Are there links that don’t use the most relevant phrasing possible to describe the page being linked to? It is important to review and update your website’s anchor text to help robots and visitors.