When people like a website, and furthermore if it's a directory, they tend to create backlinks. Up to now, just good news. The problem is when the domain name does not have any related keyword. So it raises the awareness of the brand, but unless you directly type in the brand name in your search engine, the site does not show up for the keywords you want to focus on (not talking here on the actual content of the pages, just focusing on the natural backlinks generation). What kind of incentive do you use to get keywords-focused bakclinks?
The keyword phrase anchor text should match the <title> keyword phrase text Link from NotMySite <a href="http://www.mysite.com/mypage.php" title="My Keyword Phrase">Keyword Phrase</a> Title of My Site/Page <title>My Keyword Phrase - My Second Keyword Phrase - My City</title>
I have a site where I picked a non keyword phrase as my domain for branding purposes (it is an extremely common phrase). It ranks #1 in Google for the most competitive keyword phrase in it's industry. I accomplished it by simply asking other webmasters to link to my site with my target keywords as a part of the anchor text instead of my domain name. Most people understand that I want my site topic instead of my site brand as the anchor text.
Thanks, freelistfool, exactly what I wanted to know. But you say you asked webmasters, hence they already knew a bit about SEO. The people I'm targeting are more photographers and artists with a website, so most of them have a very minimal knowledge of the reasons behind, but I will try to explain it a bit in the emails I send them to get better targeted words.