Ranking For Non-Context-Friendly Terms Without Anchor-Text
-
We are now at a point with Google where having a link profile that has a lot of exact match anchor text for a few main keyword targets is not a good thing. So, how do we rank for terms that do not fit into the content of your site, but are still good keyword targets.
Here is an example from my situation. A good keyword target for my area and business that I am working for is "plumber riverside" or "plumber riverside ca." In a gramatical sense, these two/three words do not belong together in content, i.e they would not make a proper sentence being placed together, except with maybe a comma or period separating them. In fact, this term probably wouldn't even make a good sidebar link copy.
Without having a link profile with "plumber riverside" as my most common anchor text, how can I let Google know that I should rank for this term? Anchor text used to be the go to but now you have to really minimize the use of it for exact match terms. Without on page content, it seems pretty hard. Any thoughts?
-
I think the next stage of the game for me is learning more about co-citation and co-occurrence. Seems like that is where everything is headed. Thanks Matt!
-
Hi Tony,
It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.
Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:
Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...
In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely
Matt
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Backlinks to an anchor name URL: How Google sees them
I have been searching for the answer to this question and to my surprise have yet to find anything on the web. This is my situation: I have a form at the bottom of one of my pages and have another website that wants to link to this page, more specifically this form. I have an anchor link on the page to this form already. I was planning on sending the anchor name URL to the Webmaster to link to my page so their users will go straight to my form. My question is: do I lose link juice to my URL from this link because it is an anchor name URL? Does Google see this link that goes to a specific portion of my page to be less valuable than if I just linked to the plain URL? Cheers Sean
Link Building | | Tyler1232 -
Should I embark on this long term link building campaign?
I've been planning to set out on a massive link building campaign for the term 'how to start a business' and I can't decide if it's a good idea or not. (Metrics attached - my site is the last listed and the ones above it are the top ranking for that term) The sites ranking for that terms are on very authoritative domains, but the page link profiles on each of them are poor. This is one of those moments where you think, 'Am I about to waste a tremendous amount of time?' My guide is extremely thorough and I had hoped with a MASSIVE amount of elbow grease outranking pages that had poor content value + only has 4 referring root domains. The problem is, I'm not sure if the powerful overall domain authority would still outrank my newer site. Should I follow through with that general guide or focus on less hard to rank and less searched content? Argh confusion GB3jcsJ.png?1
Link Building | | ryj0 -
Your recommendation for a SEO friendly bulletin board software?
Hi there, if you set up a public bulletin board in the context of a SEO project, what product can you recommend? phpBB? A great plugin for Wordpress? ...? My requirements are complete configuration options of the relevant onsite elements, editing/moderation capability of all posts, authentication. Thanks!
Link Building | | kqkq0 -
Can a sitewide backlink with exact anchor text penalize my website?
A few years ago, I exchanged a link with another website. In the meantime, this other website grew quite fast and now they just added a forum. The backlink from their website is sitewide and is using the anchor text "best web hosting". According to Google, this backlink now appears on 117,000 pages of the same domain. Yesterday, I just got a warning from Google: "We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines..." Could that sitewide link be one of the causes? Of course I know there are tons of bad links to my site but I'm wondering if I should get this one removed. Thank you for your help and sorry for my english. Stephane
Link Building | | sbrault740 -
Ranking discrepancies
The head office of our organisation has just set up a new website and I see that it is ranking third below two of our retail stores. I performed a link analysis s and see we out rank our stores in terms of Links etc. Can someone explain to me why we are below these stores. Also our website was only launched a week a go. Could this have an effect?
Link Building | | dawsonski0 -
Multiple KW's , on-page and anchor text
Hello, For each page on my site, I've targeted one primary keyword and three to four secondary keywords. All of the keywords variants are tightly themed. With some on-page, I've ranked page two or three for all of the keywords and many are starting to convert based on Analytics data. Each page scores an "A" using the SEOmoz KW targeting tool for the "primary keyword only". For secondary keywords, I've only included words but not the complete keyword. For example, if the primary keyword is "blue green widgets" and the secondary keyword is "get blue green widgets", I've included the word "get" throughout the copy to target the secondary keyword. My questions are... Should I include each secondary keyword once in the copy and not just the word "get" for example? Just wondering if there is a better approach to target all of the keywords via on-page. When getting links to each page, how would you vary the anchor text to target all of the keywords, primary and secondary? Thanks!
Link Building | | ShaneO0 -
Link Building in non-competitive industry
Hello, My client's home page is targething 2 keywords - one at 43% difficulty (SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool) and one at 50% difficulty. I want to link build for this person, but I analyzed the top 5 competitors and there is no resource section on any of the sites. We want to write 20 articles for our site. So there's no people linking to content that I can find. This messes up my link building because I always make targeted content on the subject that people are already linking to How do I link build in this case. Nothing stands out as something I could do with my site for link bait. Thanks!
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
How to have an internal call to action with an anchor that employs the correct internal linking practices?
I wanted to put a call to action in my internal profiles, but I'm not able to get out of the classic "check out" and "learn more" links. Right now the best copy I've been able to come up with is: <nickname>is using StyleJam for his web design portfolio - check out the benefits </nickname> Where "check out the benefits" is a link to my home page. I wanted to understand first of all how important this is, and second what techniques you use for internal calls to action. TIA.
Link Building | | ngw0