Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Questions :
Would Google consider "blue widgets" to also be an anchor text together with "blue widgets ideas"? ie. I don't need to change my anchor texts.
or
Should I start to target the specific keywords "blue widgets"?
I would save that anchor for the best sites that link to you, but always use variations either way.
I started off a year ago targetting "blue widgets ideas" and made it to #7. However, I started noticing that I was also moving up to #29 for "blue widgets".
I was wondering if I should just leave my main anchor texts as "blue widgets ideas" or specifically target "blue widgets".
I did a lot of work on a 2 word key phrase that brought me more vistors but no more business, as it was too generic.
The 3 word and 4 word phrases matched exactly what my paying customers wanted.
However if the 2 word phrase matches exaclty, you should still follow the advice of the previous post. If every anchor text link you do from now only has the same 2 words, the links can be seen as created rather than natural and it could harm you rather than help you.
I had a site where 97% of its back links were the same phrase. There were sites with only half the quality and quality of links well ahead of me in rankings. When I started to use longer more descriptive phrases, my rankings much improved for the 2 word phrase I had been targeting. Clearly a filter had been removed
Mark
Clearly a filter
whatever it is I'm doing, I must be doing something right coz I'm up to #4 (from #7) on some datacenters for "blue widgets ideas" and also moved up to #13 (from #30) for "blue widgets".
Me thinks me will just be a good boy, leave things be and let it all flow naturally.
On a new site, I just recently have been targeting a frase like "blue widgets for someone". Unfortunately for me, the last word in the keyword phrase ("someone" in the example) is a sand box keyword. So my new site comes up for blue widgets (out of 25mill) and for the whole phrase (what I really want, under 8mill) I am nowhere to be found...
Sigh, but atleast I am comming out in some results.
There is a monster keyword that is in one of my site's domain name. We've never done anything to ranke for that keyword by itself. As it is, that word has several different noun and verb meanings. We really don't care all that much how we rank for that single keyword.
What we are interested in is a lot of the 2-5 word keyphrases, and we've been ranking for more and more of them over the last 4 years.
I think we finally broke into the top 1000 out of 37 million about 2 years ago. Today we are at #11. Remember, we've done nothing to attempt to get that ranking on that single keyword.
Personally, I think that concentrating on ranking for the less populare related keyphrases *is* the way to reach long term success on the more popular keyphrases.
long tail of search? I've been reading on that lately : The total searches for less popular keyphrase variants is usually more than double the total for main keyword search.
By strengthening your site's "signls" in these areas, you have a much lower chance of getting your urls filtered out of the Google results -- because you don't need to use extreme and aggressive methods.
177733 different keyphrases comprised of 19092 keywords brought traffic to our site in a recent log analysis run.
Long tail diversity is where it is at.
But wouldn't targetting too many variants for your key phrases (example in your description tag) get you into trouble with keyword spam?
yeah, if you are trying to target them all with one page, and you even bother with a description tag.
But the long tail isn't really about specific targeting, it is a much more zen approach.
Suppose your website is about cars. "car" is an obvious one word term with millions of competitors, but there is little point in going for that.
You don't even expect to do that well on the car brand names such as "ford" or "toyota", but you have natural language pages on those brands. Sure, you would be willing to take traffic on those searches, but you don't bother to try for them.
The "long tail" is where you write about your experiences working on your Subaru Legacy, and you start getting searces on [subaru legacy brake switch] or [engine makes a thunky noise]. You would never target those phrases, but you get them because you targeted the important keywords, and had sufficient variety in your content to pick up on a lot of the really strange searches that people do.
I was just looking at the September stats for one of my sites. 108,000 searches came in on over 39,000 keyphrases. The top phrase got only 407 referrals, and there are only 43 over 100.
There is no way that the site "targets" 40,000 keyphrases, and there aren't any description meta tags.
The long tail is about putting a certain amount of targeting in on the main subjects, but making sure that you have piles of good content about those subjects as well.
going by that, it would appear to me that I am already one-up on my long tail. my site gives short write-ups about a very broad range of topics with one common aim, and so for each page I am already including lots of key phrases relating to each topic and they DO bring in lots of of referrals.
My original intention was to target a new MAIN key phrase which should bring in double referrals than my current main key phrase. I started considering this because I noticed I was getting referrals for key phrases that I never considered and checking the number of searches these phrases got everyday, I figured it might be worth it to gear up and jump into a bigger pond.
