Targeting Multi-Word KW Phrases

I have been going after some multi-word phrases that as a whole are pretty unique, but are composed of quite generic individual words. I absolutely dominate when searches are performed in quotes ""; however, with normal unquoted queries I am nowhere. Sometimes I get lucky and Google will give split results with quotes in them, but this is pretty rare.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to attack this problem from an SEO standpoint? People will never search with quotes...that is a given, so I need to adjust my methods when it comes to optimization.

How should I attack this situation? Any particular changes to how I should link build?

 

Hi,

It varies with each update, but you will consistently see less competition when you use the quotes, because Google only returns results which exactly match that phrase.

Today, the emphasis seems to be on an exact match in the title (for the term I just compared; "hotels in Turkey" 247,000 hits).

If you don't use the quotes, then you get more hits (10.2 million) and therefore more competition. This is because you see other variations of your search phrase, such as singular, pages with the term separated etc.

As another example, do a search for car hire, and you will see "car rental" "rent a car" etc.... That's word stemming and is used a lot by google:
http://www.google.com/help/basics.html#stemming

What can you do? Just keep doing what you're doing... keep getting backlinks, and adding good, relevant content!

Cheers,
Paz.

 

There's not much you can do except get more back links ...
Already mentioned above .

Good luck.
Jeet

 

Of course...The more IBL's the better.

However, should I change the way I get links? I usually go out of my way to vary my anchor text, but perhaps with such long, generically composed kw phrases, increasing the percentage of IBL's that have EXACT anchor text is the way to go?

 

Hi,

I always make a big effort to mix up my anchor text too.

If you decide to target exact key phrases then you can probably get a few backlinks spread over time, and do the rest with "on page" factors such as title, heading etc.

Cheers,
Paz.

 

Looking at the SERPs I notice an interesting thing.

Generally, no other sites are changing in the top 20 when I put the search term in quotes. Yet my site jumps to the very top (with quotes) from nowhere (without).

Analyzing the competition I see that they have almost identical onpage factors and their backlinks/anchor text looks VERY similar to my own (both in composition, quality, and quantity). This leads me to believe their is something else going on here that is filtering my site.

I don't believe this is just the "when you put your site in quotes of course it will jump up" going on here. Very strange.