I see a lot of people linking their keywords in forum signatures and had a question about external links. As an example, if i were trying to optimize for the phrase "Doy Toy" (just an example) would a link with the anchor words "Buy a Dog Toy" or "The Dog Toy Company" also optimize for "Dog Toy" or am I better of only using the words "Dog Toy" as the actual link text? Thanks Zan32
I think both would help, but the exact phrase helps even more. Essentially those other words are diluting the weight put on each keyword. So you would be wasting link weight on words like 'the, company, etc'. You would get much better rankings by getting lots of links using exact link anchor text. It is a good idea to focus on several different keyword phrases at a time though. So instead of getting all links using 'dog toy', at the same time get links using some overlapping or related phrases.
Well said. Also, use a good keyword tool to find good keywords to target. Otherwise you may be shooting in the dark. I use Market Samurai
instead of getting all links using 'dog toy', at the same time get links using some overlapping or related phrases
Generally speaking, you should keep your keyword linking to four words or less. I have to disagree a little bit with the members who have posted before me. "Buy a Dog Toy" and "The Dog Toy Company" are better link text than "Dog Toy" in my opinion. To explain, I'll refer to each of the preceeding as link A, B, and C. Link A and B contain the same text as link C. Link A and B are 4 words or less. Link B will yield additional results for: Dog Toy, Dog, Toy, Dog Toy Company, Toy Company, etc. In my experience, if your link text is 4 words you'll maximize benefit.
Hi, I completely Agree with you. In short we can say that keyword phrases can give you better response than single keywords. Try to target keyword phrase. Thanks
Are you serious? It doesn't matter if a keyword has one word or ten, if your research shows that the volume of searches is high and the competition in the search results are low, then it is usually a good keyword to target. If you found "Dog Toy" to be a good keyword to target (high search volume, low competing pages competition), then why the heck would you use "The Dog Toy Company" as anchor text? First of all, the word "the" is dropped from google searches when typed in the search box with other words. So why would you target it? Secondly, you are diluting the emphasis the SEs will put on your main targeted keyword "dog toy" with the extra two useless words in "The Dog Toy Company". Unless many people are searching for the exact phrase "The Dog Toy Company" you should not be targeting it. As for "Buy a Dog Toy", you are doing the same thing here. You put "a" in the keyword, which is also dropped from Google searches. Common words such as "the", "a", "of", etc. are commonly reffered to as "stopwords", and are excluded or dropped from search engine searches. It would be foolish to include them in your anchor text. Without any research I would bet next months pay "Buy Dog Toys" would be many many many times better to target than "Buy A Dog Toy". My point is it all comes down to keyword research. If you just decide to target keywords because you think "they are better link text", you are shooting in the dark and probably will not have any success. You NEED to use a good keyword tool, and not just guess at good keywords to target. Like I said before, I use Market Samurai. Notice there are no affiliate links here. It is just what I use and the thing is phenomenal. I have found many, many keywords that have less than 100,000 competing pages in Google and get searched thousands of times each month. With a little more research of the top ten pages in google for those keywords, and a quick check for commercial intent, you can bet your ass if a keyword passes these tests it will be a profitable keyword to target. I'm sure there are other keyword tools out there that function in the same way as Market Samurai. If you don't have the cash to buy one, you can still find good keywords to target. It will just take quite a bit more time and work, which is still better than guessing.
I see how one could get lead to think that you should keep it under a magic number of words. In some cases it would make sense to include other keywords in the link, but if you add too many it does dilute the effectiveness of each individual word. Think of it as a PR just for each individual word that it is in your links. Each link has only so much keyword PR to send. So you want to spread that keyword PR to your most important keywords. Including unnecessary words like 'the' and 'company' doesn't make sense. It would be great to throw in some variations like buy a dog toy, buy dog toys, dog toy supplier, best dog toys, etc. I would still focus a lot of links on the exact keyword phrase that you want to target. Those links would be sending maximum keyword PR. I wouldn't be surprised at all if exact phrase links even gave an extra boost because it shows even more relevance to that keyword. If I had a choice between a website with mostly all 4 word links and a website with a wide mix of short and long exact phrases, I would take the website with the wide mix any day.
As per my experience “Buy Dog Toy†and “Dog Toy†are the better text link. Keyword phases are obviously preferable in SEO.
"obviously preferable" because one word keywords are usually way to broad and even if you do manage to get ranked for a one word keyword, the traffic would be far from targeted