Hi, Currently one of my sites is ranking fairly high on google for my main keyword phrase (page 3 as of today). I want to get that to page 1, but also start to target other keyword phrases as well. My question is, if I target other phrases, will that also help with the rankings for my main keyword phrase or should I just keep targetting my main phrase to see if I manage to get onto the magical first page? Cheers.
The short answer, "yes" Basically if you target the same keyword for all your incoming links Google can tell that this is not natural linking. If you think about it from the point of view that the search engines want to give more value to the sites with the most natural links ie people that want to link to the sites, then try and find ways of getting links so it is undecipherable whether they are natural or not. By linking in this way, you may even find yourself ahead of the game as the search engines change their algorithms for better results.
I would just like to add one thing to Weirfire's comment: Regardless of whether or not getting varied link text will give you a penalty, you will still need to get links with appropriate anchor text. Getting links of any kind will slowly help your site in ALL searches. This is how sites like Amazon can rank well for so many different terms. However, if you are targeting a specific search term, then a link will the appropriate anchor text is far more valuable than one without it. So, of course you do not want to get penalized for having all your links have the same anchor text (and I don't believe this happens very often right now, but it is always a possibility in the future), and general links will help, but links with the right anchor text are still by far the most valuable.
deffinately use different related keywords as anchor text - it would look a little odd if all your links have the same text - kinda manufacturered
agreed. Not only will it help keep you out of the penalty filter for too many fast links, it will also help ensure you get rankings from multiple searches.
I agree that the page or site needs to have a natural link pattern. I have been conducting some tests - found in my sig. While most the high ranking sites have significant proportion of anchor text that is similar to the search phase, the majority of the links are just the url or the name of the site itself.