Question Re Cornerestone Page And Anchor Text For Internal/External Links
-
Suppose I create a cornerstone page with the targeted keyword "Dog Collars". I write a dozen articles on various dog collars and point a link from each article to my cornerstone page. Should the anchor text for the links from each of those articles to the cornerstone page be "Dog Collars" or should they vary, but still be relevant to "Dog Collars" for best SEO? Should half of them be "Dog Collars" and the other half various? Also, if I have 12 articles and all of the anchor text is already "Dog Collars", should I go back and change them so that they all don't say the same thing?
If hope my question makes sense ... thanks in advance. I will give thumbs up for helpful responses and suggestions
-
Such as video (maybe a comparison of the pros and cons/features/styles/uses/quality of a variety of different collars), audio (interviews with retailers/veterinarians about what which ones they recommend/or sell the most) press release (maybe on a recall/particular new style/your investment in technology for 3D printing of dog collars)--that kind of thing.
-
Thanks Drew
-
Thanks Chris! One clarification ... when you say that you would be looking at "more than just written content", what specifically do you mean? What other type of content would you employ?
Thanks
-
Let the page and meta data do the talking for relevance and your off-page references do the talking for authority. If I was spending resources on "dog collars", I'd be looking at more than just written content and I'd be looking at how to get it hosted offsite, at locations where it would be able to generate signals of engagement--ideally from social profiles already that are already involved with anything that's thematically relevant. I'd also be concentrating on authorship and how to strengthen it's application to your brand from off-site.
If you're able to do those things with one or two pieces of content, the impact is going to be as strong or stronger than your 12 anchor text laden links--especially when you consider that Google is moving towards de-weighting the value of anchor text and keywords as a ranking factor.
In direct answer to your question, I think Drew gave a pretty good response but I'd reverse the percentage of "desired keywords" and "keyword alternatives" and I'd up the percentage of brand links a bit, while lowering the generic.
-
I'm new and this is my first response, but I believe your answer is as follows for proper anchor text:
20-30% desired keyword - "dog collars"
10-20% keyword alternatives - "pet collar" and the like
30% brand - "Pets R Us"
30% generic - "click here" "website" etc...
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
-
410 /demandware.store/ pages
I have a client that just migrated to salesforce commerce cloud. They have a large amount of 410 pages showing up in site crawls. They are all of the /on/demandware.store/ variety. Is there any reason to redirect thousands of these pages? Any value? Or should they be allowed to drop off?
On-Page Optimization | | bdcseo1 -
ASP Canonical and Internal Linking
Hello - I'm working with a large ASP website and trying to troubleshoot issues I believe might be related to how the canonical element is used. On page - all internal links, including navigation links, use the following format (uppercase) - website.com**/F**older/Folder/Product . So, any page navigated to will always display the uppercase version of the URL. And, all of these pages have the canonical tag pointing to the lowercase version of the URL. The pages included in Google's index are all lowercase versions of the URL like this - website.com**/f**older/folder/product . My concern is that a lot of internal authority flow is being impacted/negated because all internal links point to the uppercase versions of URLs and all those pages reference the lowercase version URL in the canonical reference. Is this a valid concern?
On-Page Optimization | | LA_Steve0 -
Do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page?
do links in footers or side bars count less than links in the center of the web page? How much less if so? I have some articles on my site. Would i get more of a boost in rankings to pages of my site by placing links in the text of my articles on my site to other pages on my site? Thanks mozzers!
On-Page Optimization | | Ron100 -
Question about the variations of keyphrases on different pages
Hi, I am a big fan of seomoz and read a lot of articles! I have a new site for services in London. I have 5 main keyphrases on 5 different pages. Would it be better to make new pages with variations of those 5 keyphrases? As an example: one of the main keyphrases is "Service London" and I want to create new pages -- "Services West Ruislip", "Services Poplar", "Services Brixton" and etc. Should it be better to do it as described or to keep the 5 main keywords and focus on them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | yanko840 -
Too many links on the same page
I have a problem with to many links on the same page, and there all for the classified adds of my web site, what would be the best way to handle this.
On-Page Optimization | | clickit2getwithit0 -
How important are internal pages to overall site rank?
This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario: We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords. Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | omg_jlsa0 -
How are your "Service Area" pages handling Penguin/Panda?
We just got a new client because of recent Penguin/Panda changes. A national "SEO" firm decided it was a good idea to set up a page for each service town or county they serve with nothing but duplicate content. Needless to say, on the week of the 23rd, their rankings tanked from 1st page (it's not a competitive niche) to 4th. I'm not bringing this up to brag, but rather because it got me thinking... How are your geographically targeted "service area" pages doing? Have the recent changes caused you to rethink your geographic targeting in any way?
On-Page Optimization | | BedeFahey0 -
Similar Keywords/Different Pages
My question is about my content strategy regarding keywords and page creation. For this example I will use the following keywords: "widget financing" "widget leasing" "widget loans" "thingy financing" "thingy leasing" "leasing loans" "whatchamacallit financing" "whatchamacallit leasing" "whatchamacalit loans" You get the idea. Now I have created a separate page for each of these keywords. There are about 70 keywords and their respective pages. Although all of these describe the same thing I have re-written each page. In other words I didn't use the same content and just substituted the keywords. Each page is roughly 200 to 500 words. I do rank very well for most of these keywords. I would post some of the pages from my site here but I didn't know if that is frowned on. My fear/concern is will I get in trouble in a "post Panda" world. Again, the pages rank very well I just want to be in good graces with Google going forward.
On-Page Optimization | | leaseman0