Hi everyone, I'm making a list with key phrases i want to use in anchor texts of links to my website. The question I have is: Does the keyword order matter? For example: the key phrase I want to target is "Amsterdam budget hotels" if I search on http://www.google.com/advanced_search for amsterdam budget hotels as anchor text in links I get: 3,020 results for allinanchor: amsterdam budget hotels 2,270 results for allinanchor: "amsterdam budget hotels" if I use "Budget hotels Amsterdam" as anchor text does it still have a positive effect on the key phrase "Amsterdam budget hotels"? Or should I stick to a fixed word order?
I have found that to a certain extent, keyword order matters. On the whole, not that critical in the scheme of things. Much more important, I believe, is traffic and time spent on your site. I wrote about it here: Google, Google Analytics, and the Changing Face of SEO Rich
SEs are KW sensitive and they treated KWs differently. so if you'll jumbled out your KW phrases, there's no guarantee that it can help your actual target KWs
As with these two guys I think it has an effect but it's not that great. I often find country add ons either before or after tend to have different traffic volumes but the rankings don't differ that much.
If you just perform a search query by replacing the position of the words in the phrase you will also notice the number of sites containing the words. This might tell that it has importance, and it would be smart optimizing your site for all variations.
there is something known as keyword density, so x amount of keywords in a page and the more important ones near the higher portion of the site, important keywords in the title and h1 tag. When a anchor text is followed from y site to z site the spider wants to assess that it has reached a relevant site and it wants to be able to measure that easily and accurately as possible.