15 replies to this topic

[webdesigners123]

I read about the important of the anchor rich text links and their relevancy for the website ranking.
However, how do you optimize your website for more then one phrase? Variety of anchor rich text links will be enough or there is some methods that SEOs use?

To be more specific:
Our website has some back links.
When we first started to exchange links we use our website name ( might be a wrong thing to do), "webdesigners123", as the anchor text. Later on, we asked it to be "web designers 123". This days we ask for "freelance web designer".

Before you will judged us about the history of our anchor text, I would say that we did so without knowing much about the value of the anchor text importance. I believe that Its not the end of the world, since most of the work is a head of us.

As I learn so much from you guys so far, I am bringing this issue before we are doing any changes in our strategy.
Our goal is to be on the top of the search results for the phrase "freelance web designer". We picked this phrase knowing that this phrase is the best suit to our website service, it has 243 requests/day world wide (according to WEB CEO keywords tool). However, in the long run we would like to be also on the top 10 of the "web designer" phrase. This phrase is much more popular, and has much more competitors.

How can we plan our SEO strategy to be optimized for both phrases at the same time?

Thank you for you help in advanced.

Edited by Jill, 01 November 2005 - 04:24 PM.

[Jill]

How To Do Seo For More Then One Phrase ?,

How do you optimize for ONLY one phrase? To me that's much more difficult.

When you speak or write, do you say the same words over and over again? I'm pretty sure I don't, or at least I try not to.

So, how could any one-page ever be only optimized for one keyword phrase? It just makes no sense.

[webdesigners123]

When you speak or write, do you say the same words over and over again?  I'm pretty sure I don't, or at least I try not to.

So, how could any one-page ever be only optimized for one keyword phrase? It just makes no sense.

Hmm.... your words make sense to hear, but in a matter of SEO I am not sure that I can understand how to plan our SEO strategy according to it.

[SearchRank]

Each page of your site can target a different unique phrase. For example maybe you are an attorney and you practice criminal law. You could have a page that deals with drunk driving, another on stalking, another on identity theft and so on and so forth.

If someone uses all their pages to try to promote one single keyword or phrase, they are missing the opportunity to target a variety of others that may also be related to the site or what they do.

[webdesigners123]

Each page of your site can target a different unique phrase. For example maybe you are an attorney and you practice criminal law. You could have a page that deals with drunk driving, another on stalking, another on identity theft and so on and so forth.

If someone uses all their pages to try to promote one single keyword or phrase, they are missing the opportunity to target a variety of others that may also be related to the site or what they do.

Unlike the attorney example the nature of our website is that most of its pages are dynamically created, so the content.

Our desire is to have those phrases to be refered to the same page - the home page.

Please note that my question mostly deal with the anchor text link factor, unless there is no meaning for the anchor text as a factor influencing the search results ranking for a specific phrase. As far as I understood it has a major weight, especially when you deal with Google.

Edited by webdesigners123, 01 November 2005 - 05:11 PM.

[Jill]

Hmm....  your words make sense to hear, but in a matter of SEO I am not sure that I can understand how to plan our SEO strategy according to it.

A large portion of your SEO strategy should be put into the copywriting on your pages. Which is why I was discussing how we speak and write. So much of your rankings will be had by what you say on your pages. If you want to say the same thing over and over again (in order to optimize for just one phrase) well, then good luck to you!

[Jill]

Our desire is to have those phrases to be refered to the same page - the home page.

Big, big, huge, giant mistake.

[SanDiegoMedia]

Why would you want all your traffic to be going through the home page when it could actually be going to a page that actually discusses the term that the user was searching for.

Think conversion. KISS your site, and SEO plan. Keep It Simple Stupid, don't make your users think, or they'll just hit the back button and find something more relevant.

(The stupid statment wasn't directed at anyone in particular, its just part of the phrase.)

[ewc21]

I thought of KISS as Keep It Short and Simple.

If your aim is to get "freelance web designer" and later "web designer" for high ranking, note that these are quite competitive keywords that the ranking will rely more on off-page (linking, directory listing, etc) more than on-page SEO efforts.

With those keywords in mind, build the page (you said this is your homepage) in such a way that it describes a freelance web designer in the most comprehensive way. You have the two phrases so work on them in your copywriting. Right now it's more on webmasters and web designers, but I thought it should be okay.

Optimize the page with quality keywords (not stuffing your page with your selected keywords). Image alt attributes help especially if images are hyperlinks (your 'Welcome to Webmasters123' image banner can have alt attribute of "Welcome to Webmasters123" and link to your About page).

Hope this helps.

[Jill]

Today's SEO cannot be done in a vacuum. You can't just optimize one page and expect to get rankings. You won't. Not for any phrases that matter.

The whole site has to work together to get your rankings.

[chompy]

It was my understanding that if you have been able to optimize your site (or your page if you must insist) for the keyword "freelance web design", chances are pretty good that you have also optimized it for "web design" since the second keyword is a subset of the first. That is, if you really had anchor text & backlinks to both keywords.

[AffiliateInsight]

Hi folks,

I appreciate that it's important in general to ask how many different key phrases a particular page should try and tackle, but at the same time I feel like focusing on this question risks obscuring an underlying distinction between semantic relevance and syntactic optimization: I take it that the two are not the same. Moreover, they're becoming less and less the same as search engine algorithms increase in sophistication.

What I mean by this distinction is that syntactic optimization (factors like key phrase frequency, etc.) does not uniquely determine relevance in terms of the meaning a piece of text has in the mind of a real live human being. And it is, after all, real live human beings that search engines are trying to offer relevant content for. Debating how many key phrases to optimize for risks putting the syntactic cart before the semantic horse.

I just picked up on this forum via a rustybrick blog posting, so I'm a newbie around here. As a result, I'm not supposed to post any live links. However, if you visit AffiliateInsight.com and click on the 'Marketing Blog' link, you'll find a post I've just written about this distinction and why it makes sense to focus on real live content and its relevance to real human readers, rather than on syntactic statistics which are almost guaranteed to be less sophisticated than those employed by search engine algorithms.

All the best,
Greg

[reddevil]

For a more practical example - if you count the number of times each word appears on your page, and the number of times each phrase appears on your page, you will probably get a good idea on what words/phrases your page will rank best for. But whether your page will be no.1 or no.1,000 nobody knows.

[Michael Martinez]

It was my understanding that if you have been able to optimize your site (or your page if you must insist) for the keyword "freelance web design", chances are pretty good that you have also optimized it for "web design" since the second keyword is a subset of the first. That is, if you really had anchor text & backlinks to both keywords.

Life is rarely that simple and convenient.

If you successfully optimize for "web design", odds are pretty good you'll get a good listing for "freelance web design". If you optimize for "freelance web design", you may end up on page 30 for "web design".

What used to be called "power keyword optimization" is the technique of taking a longer phrase and breaking it down into smaller sub-phrases, optimizing for it. To be honest, this worked best back in the days when the engines were still influenced by keywords meta tags. Making it work in today's world of context-sensitive indexing is more of a challenge.

[RonBurk]

I read about the important of the anchor rich text links and their relevancy for the website ranking.

Rule of thumb: If you're reading about a very important SEO technique, it probably peaked in importance a year or more ago.

Consider the following scenario, which I think is entirely plausible:

• You invest big time and effort in SEOing for your chosen phrase.
• Google shifts their algorithm to amplify the effect of variables like links from trusted authorities and volume of unique, semantically related content.
• Because of your focus on SEO, trusted authorities are less likely to link to you, and you've invested little effort in volume of semantically related material.
• Competitors who focussed on building useful, information-packed websites instead of SEO scoot right past you in the rankings, and you're back to square one.

You also might want to consider that some competitors might be cleaning up by not scoring high for your chosen keyword at all, but instead scoring well for a couple of hundred less competitive search terms, and by other traffic-generating techniques, such as writing useful (useful enough that others want to reference it) white papers, offering a free utility, etc.

Like Jill says, shooting for one or two keywords is typically not a great idea. The set of terms your potential customers are searching for is huge. If you add up the traffic from all the terms that only bring in a handful of hits per day or less, it will typically sum to more traffic than you'll get from your one "big" term. And those lower-traffic terms will typically be easier to rank well for.