If you are trying to get the keyword, for example, dogs and you put in your anchor text "dogs, man's best friend," would google count this as a "vote" for dog?
that would be a very poor choice of anchor text. you should select a keyword that is searched by people and use that to hyperlink to you site. example of good anchor text would be "guard dogs" or "training dogs" or "dog trainers" etc. if however you write an article and publish somewhere, you can use "dogs, man's best friend" as a title but within your article body, use the right keyword to link back to your site.
Yes I agree that an exact phrase of a searched keyword is a much better anchor text. If you add too many extra words it dilutes the strength of 'dogs'. Since dogs would be such a competitive phrase, you would want to build up strength for a lot of related overlapping phrases first.
Thanks everyone. I wasn't really trying to optimize for the word dog though, I was just using that as an example. The real example would be... "Childproofing services" if I am only looking to get "childproofing".
Surely, google will count this, but you should use different anchor text hyper linked with the respective page.
Try not to use common keywords.. Be more specific like training-dogs or what type of dogs like saint Bernard dog.
"dogs, man's best friend" is a poor keyword selection. Choose other keywords, or better yet, less competitive ones, with good search volume.