Internal anchor text is one of the easiest ranking signals to control on your own site, and it carries real weight in Google's ranking systems. The framework: (1) Anchor text should accurately describe the destination page — generic anchors ('click here', 'learn more') waste a ranking signal; (2) Vary anchor text naturally across the site — if you have 50 internal links to the same page, they should not all use identical exact-match anchor; a healthy distribution is 30% exact-match, 40% partial-match or topically related, 20% branded or destination-name, 10% generic-but-contextual; (3) Anchor text should fit the surrounding sentence naturally — over-optimization that disrupts reading flow gets discounted by Google's quality systems; (4) Avoid self-conflicting anchors — the same anchor pointing to multiple URLs creates ambiguity about which page should rank for the implied keyword; (5) Audit and fix dropped or broken internal links quarterly — a healthy internal link graph is a foundation for everything else.