Internal anchor text

[oxygenretreat]

Designed my website with one keyword, one page adage.  Wondering if i am creating an issue with internal anchor text and use of plurals for keywords.  For instance, say I want my index page to rank for keyword exotic vacations, and an inner page to rank for exotic vacation.  I do this as i notice there is a major discrepency with google when calling both the singular and plural term of certain keywords (like the example above, for instance).  I see in yahoo it views singular and plural as essentially the same word, but google appears to rank them separately.  Anyways since google is where the majority of my search traffic comes from, I separated my most competitive keywords for both singular and plural usage and created external links with anchor text that reflects this separation.

I am concerned though that I may not be handling the Internal anchor text properly.  What i have done is take a keyword l want to rank for (for example "exotic vacations") and attach it a page (for example index page) and use the anchor text "exotic vacations" on this page and link it to the inner page "exotic vacation." Reason: I want to rank for the term exotic vacations on the main page, but have a relavant page to link to this term so the closest would be the keyword exotic vacation on an inner page.

I would appreciate any feedback on this.  I think I am running into a problem with this strategy especially on the main index page/inner page keywords (plural to singular).  I also notice google will find an inner page for a time then switch it to the default domain name index page when searchign for a keyword.  Kinda keeps going back and forth. I never see any indent search results.

[caseyhen]

Hi Oxygenretreat,

Singulars and plurals should be treated the same, so your main page should be targeting both "exotic vacations" and "exotic vacation" because Google sees them as the same in most instances.  As for internal linking, it doesn't hold near the weight with Google as it has in the past.  My suggestion would be to make sure that your anchor text is related to the page and thats about it.  If you have a page about exotic vacations make sure that the internal anchor text links to it with some form of exotic vacations and not some term like "home".  Since internal anchor text is easily manipulated Google has reduced it's role in their ranking models over the past years.

Casey

[oxygenretreat]

yeah not asking about keyword research, above is an example.  Asking about best practices internal anchor text with singular and plural keywords.