If your keyword / phrase is not in the page title, don't bother chasing that page for a link. The ideal link is from a page with your keyword / phrase in the page title. Search in google for [allintitle:keyword phrase] Work the sites in those results for link opportunities, focus on getting a link from the page on their site that has the phrase in it's title. Consider paying for a link from the page listed first for an allintitle search. I would take a link from a PR2 page with the keyword phrase in the title over a link from a PR5 page without it. Look at swapping blog posts for this very reason (let me know if you are interested). Even more valuable is if the anchor text in navigation links on that site has the keyword phrase in it leading to the page in question + page in question has phrase in the page title + phrase in the anchor text linking to your site (this last factor by itself is not enough anymore). Get that combo and you are rocketing to the top of the serps.
Most of your statements and claims are completly wrong. = simply false. Sure its great to have themed links but to this extend its unrealistic. The algo isnt that advanced to note such things and consider it to be that important.
I don't have data to back it up. But you can't say any of it's false either as neither do you. I am however confident enough to put it out there for people to comment on. If you want to just write off what i have said, fine.
Your idea isnt anything new that hasnt been brought up in the past before or considered and the concept isnt a negative effect by any means. Sure emphasizing the practice of using 'themed links' is arguable to an extent and its fine but anyone with personal experience would agree that "If your keyword / phrase is not in the page title, don't bother chasing that page for a link." is the farthest away from the real truth when it comes to SERP methods. I can also argue about themed links as a theory at the current state of google algo but that wouldnt be a solid 100% statement as with the current statement.
OK, so take out the 'don't bother' and go with 'target opportunities that offer this feature' ... Sorry if the post is dramatic or over the top. Lets talk about the degree of value those links have over pages with something else in the title. I'm not saying anything new, fine. But I'm really finding this is where the best quality links are found.
I agree that having search terms in your own page title as well as on the page is essential to good SE ranking. I'm not sure it's that important in terms of pages linking to you. Actually, I believe Google's technology is easily capable of doing that - it's not really that complex and certainly not any more complex than determining page content (and thence link relevance) from other parts of the page. Of course, that doesn't mean Google is doing it - if they wanted to, they easily could but I don't know that they consider the title to be that critical in defining page content.
i think that google does not place as bigger weight on link relevancy as most people assume. I see plenty of sites doing very well with inbounds from completely irrelevant sites.
How much better would they be doing if all those links were content-relevant? We can't know this for sure, of course, unless and until Google tells us. I don't think anyone is suggesting that non-relevant links are "punished", or even that they have no value at all - just that they would be discounted/devalued compared to relevant links.
The way I look at it is, "Does having only the keywords in the title determine the whole pages theme or content?" I don't see any point in trying to focus the SEO of my sites to the limitations of Google, MSN, Yahoo or the other search engines. The search engines are always trying to give more accurate results so to answer your question I would say it's not something which is completely necessary to gain good weight from the link pointing at your site. What you are really getting at in your thread is what are the priorities for a link pointing at your site. From my own experience I would say the priorities are the following; anchor text weight of the page giving you the link page content of the page giving you the link page title of the page giving you the link number of links currently on the page giving you the link meta tags of the page giving you the link I have seen a page that has thousands of links pointing at it score highly for 10 seperate terms and on each of those occasions the allinanchor results were almost exactly the same as the keyword positions. I would be interested to hear other peoples points of view on the priority list of getting a link from another site.
To not bother may be over the top indeed - IMO it's not just the page but also the actual site/domain relevancy that counts - and that isn't just determined by Titles. Like Minstrel I fully believe Google can analyse all of what Dominic mentioned, easily, if indeed they want to (not saying they do). Dominic is probably implying link building for rankings here but don't forget link building for traffic. On page stuff may not make any difference for that puprose (deopending on topic, demographics etc.). IMO AdSense ads are a good case study of Google's ability to determine page content. If someone would do this test I think we are close to the answer on this Title debate: Monitor ad topics on a certain page, then change the Title significantly. If ads change then the Title probably gets weighted heavily for the content algo, if not then it probably doesn't. I personally don't think the title is that magical. Judging content largely on the title is a bad practise for many reasons. It's guess work really. Try going to a library and reading the book's title only and then guess the content accurately. Also, there's many software packages out there not SE friendly, i.e. static Titles by default. Parsing the actual content is far better and I think that's what Google is doing. That combined with the overall domain's topic and the anchor text. Get those 3 right and you have the perfect link IMO.
Search engines are striving to analyse and rank pages in the same way as a human would. This is their ultimate goal in building the perfect algorithm. Whenever I am building links or looking at sites I try to make a decision on whether its relevant or not from a humans perspective rather than second guessing what google thinks. Relevancy is not as clear cut as simply looking for sites that are similar to your theme. You need to look at geographic location as well for example.