How to target keywords on a new site?

[timscullin]

I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive.

After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search.

I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords?

Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.

[timscullin]

Will google actually be penalizing me for just targeting one keyword, hence the lower ranking?

[timscullin]

Thanks Vinnie!

[vforvinnie]

I would say it would look fishy if a majority of your links had the same anchor text and it wasn't your site name.  I'm not sure of the exact ratios but at least 50% of anchor text's should have your site name in them.  That is the organic #, maybe even a little higher.  The rest should be diverse too, if it's just 2-3 phrases it will look obvious.  Getting links to your site with your name in the anchor text is still great.  It helps branding, and still sends link juice to your site.

If you want to go after some competitive terms or rank higher safely in Google, I'd suggest diversifying your link portfolio.