Tell me which link is better: "Web design by John Doe" (john doe is link) "Web design by John Doe" (entire phrase is link) My reasoning is that having the keywords "web design" in the link will somehow help the keyword targeting. Am I right? Any ideas? Thanks.
Yes you should have your targeted keyword in the anchor text, with variation of them. If your targeted keyword is "web design" so the both you mentioned are not good really. I think it should be "Web design by John Doe". Please do not forget to vary your anchor text, or your links profile would be judged as spam if you have only one keyword as anchor text in most of your inbound links.
Web Design - John Doe Probably in the first couple of pages on the big G by DP now Yes - use keywords for intelligent anchor text that actually uses "key" words as the anchors for both surfers and SE's alike if you get my drift
Be sure to choose your keywords wisely for your anchor text link. Some keywords are more difficult to rank for than others. Sometimes just using a slight variation or alternate keyword for your anchor text link can rank and do better. Even research and come up with several keyword / keyphrases related to your site you think you can rank well for.
If you link it to John Doe, then the site gets a vote for the keyword John Doe. As Sxperm pointed, you'll probably be targetting the keyword web design, so it makes more sense for you to link the URL to web design rather than John Doe.
I like when it doesn't because it's always a surprise, kind of like someone offers you a door and says check this out, or you tell someone else, and so you click it out of curiosity. Now if there was a keyword saying that the clip is about a fat man shooting wildly some automatic machine gun on youtube, then you might think, well that's easy to imagine and miss out on an obese man firing an automatic gun which who knows, might trigger some kind of old memory, hopefully good and guiding
This is the whole point of link building. You MUST put keywords in the text link, to increase the rankings for that site. If you only put your name in the link, the best thing that could happen is to get some referral traffic, but if you put keywords, you may raise and get some visitors from google too
I would say use web design mytown or web design my county as anchor text - more people will search for a web designer in a town or county than for a specific web designer - if they know your name, they will find you anyway. Web design targets the national scene. As mentionned above, mix your anchor text - some website design and website designer and the odd my site etc.
Basically having the website keywords in the clickable area is one of the most effective mechanism for the best possible optimization of the site.