My site is called "Japanese-Name-Translation.com". Most pages mention these keywords and the majority of anchor text in pages linked to my site have these exact three words in them. So, there I was at the DP keyword ranking checker and I noticed a very strange thing: For the keyphrase "Japanese name translation" I am No.2 with 467,000 competing sites. However, for the keyphrase "name translation" I am No. 1 with 3,450,000 competing sites. My question is, how come I rank higher for a keyphrase that has more competition than the keyphrase for which most of my anchor text is specifically optimized for? And what does this tell us about the Google algorithm? Your speculation is invited... (You will see in my sig that I have - in the last few days - started optimizing for "kanji name translation", but this is too recent to explain the above results.)
You would think it would be easier to rank higher for a more specific keyphrase (i.e. one which had more words in it) which you were actively optimizing anchor text for.