Im building an Online mens shoe shop which sells 6 main Brands, now for backlinks firstly i want to concentrate on the homepage so would the anchor text "Quality Mens Shoes" be the best bet and then Brand the Anchor texts to the relevant brand pages? ie "Barkers Shoes" to the Barkers page? Or would using different branding links to the homepage work? Any advice much appreciated.
I would definitely go for optimizing the individual brand pages for the brand words. So optimizing your main page for "quality mens shoes", if that is the keyword you will be targeting, and then optimize each brand page for the brand - including directing the anchor texts with brand words for those pages.
If "quality men's shoes" is uncompetetive then that's a definate phrase you should be focusing on. Also try "mens shoe company" "quality footwear" "mens footwear" etc. You have to balance competetiveness with how much that phrase gets searched. http://www.orangetreeweb.com/tools/keyword_finder.php
Cotswold; Can you give us you url and perhaps we could suggest something...in general, i would think that branded terms would be an ideal target provided you have a way to order them online... Best; Eric
Cheers, good advice. one other thing, the shop cart software i used is just about to release a new version with seo optimised urls. at the moement the url is www.mydomain.com/3243/id=182.php (or similar) the new software will be www.mydomain.com/barkers-shoes/barkers-brogues I take it the second one will be better for search engines, so the question is should i wait for this new version to come out?
Ive added it to my signature now, its work in progress, stock should start being added next week and credit card processing is just awiating merchant number.
You shouldn't use exactly the same anchor text for all the links to a particular page, because that would look unnatural and "rigged", and could cause Google to devalue the links. Instead, you should use minor variations in the wording to make it look more natural.
choose some good keywords to backlink your home page .No need to give the specific keywords as backlink.
Your page titles look fairly well SEO optimised though having SEO friendly URL's would be helpful for the product page. If you get this changed then make sure you get this done so the old URL's forward on to the new URL (as it takes a little while of Google to reindex all of your site). You homepage may look a bit neater if you use this symbol | to break up keywords. e.g. Quality Mens Shows | Churches Shoes | and so on.. Good luck with site.
forget all other things, one simple way, place keywords your anchor text, you can place about 3 keywords,,, it usually works,
Make sure the landing page content should quite relevant to the anchor text and the page title appears on there.