How to target keywords on a new site?
-
I have a site I launched a few months back, and the niche isn't all that competitive.
After a bit of work the domain is now sitting near the bottom of page 2 on google but it's number 2 in yahoo search.
I have been manually building the links but they are all targeted to just one keyword, and mainly have the same link text. Will this look suspicious to google, and should I be spreading my anchor text over different keywords?
Or is the reason Im ranking so well in yahoo be because they are just picking up more backlinks? 23 from yahoo but only 9 from google.
-
Will google actually be penalizing me for just targeting one keyword, hence the lower ranking?
-
Thanks Vinnie!
-
I would say it would look fishy if a majority of your links had the same anchor text and it wasn't your site name. I'm not sure of the exact ratios but at least 50% of anchor text's should have your site name in them. That is the organic #, maybe even a little higher. The rest should be diverse too, if it's just 2-3 phrases it will look obvious. Getting links to your site with your name in the anchor text is still great. It helps branding, and still sends link juice to your site.
If you want to go after some competitive terms or rank higher safely in Google, I'd suggest diversifying your link portfolio.
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
-
Keyword Alt text in Links
I am wondering about alt text in links. My website was ranking in the top 1-5 position for all my main keywords from 2006-2012. I took a big hit in april 2012 and my rankings tanked with the penguin update. I've really just left seo alone for the past year as I assumed my rankings would come back, obviously not. I am still ranked 90-120 for my main keyword a year later, other keywords I am still ranked between position #7-11 which I am happy enough with. I did not receive any warnings from google so I'm not de-listed and don't have a manual penalty. My main problem was if someone wanted to link to my site I just asked them to use the exact same alt text in the link pointing to my site. So after using seomoz explorer I see I have just over 2700 links which Is great because I never approached anyone for links I just told them the alt text I wanted when anyone approached me, which shows people felt my site was good. My main problem is I have 600 of the 2700 links with the exact same alt text. Should I use the disavow tool to remove links with that key word phrase? Would that help? I look forward to any help with this. Thanks.
Link Building | | Want1stPlaceYesterday0 -
Buying High PR Sites
Is it possible to buy old sites that no longer have a site up that has a high PR? Can I just put up another site about anything I want and rank well for it? I see that my link profile (anchor text) will not support my on site SEO. However, could I link to another site and pass page rank with this tactic? Please discuss... Especially those doing this...
Link Building | | JML11790 -
How to pick the right keywords for backlink building in a Huge site
Hi there, I'm running a coupons/discounts web site, with more than 1 millon page indexed. The website niche is crearly related to Coupons, Discounts, Deals, but those discounts may apply to hundreds of different categories. Currently we are getting 15K organic visits a day. Every time we have to write blog articles to increase backlinking, the same question came up. Should we target our niche keyowrds (which are very competitive) or should we pick long tail keyword (3-4 words) to be more specific ? The 70-80% of the organic traffic we receive every day came from long tail keywords, for which we never did any offert to rank with. This 70-80% traffic lands into internal pages. So basically the question is: should I keep backlinking the home page to get more juice on my domain, which will organically flows to the long tail landing pages ? Or should I write hundreds of articles targetting directly the long tail ? I think that targetting the long tail will cost me a lot of effort, i.e. for a particular long tail google search (with 4 or more keywords) I get 10 visitis a day, ranking in postion 3. If I made a lot of effort to rank in the first position for that long tail keyword, I may only get 50 visits a day, so for duplicating my daily visit amount I should do that work for thousandths of keywords, which seems, to not have much sense. So, should we target the domain and lets the rank flows from there, or should we point to thousandths of internal long tail landing pages ? I hope I made my self clear enough. Thanks in advance
Link Building | | martincad0 -
1 page 2 keywords?
Hello folks, I have a problem with optimizing a page for 2 different keywords. Here is the situation: On-page: Both keywords in title; both words in body text (I didn't count them but approximately 3-4 times for 100 words in total) Off-page: Exact anchor text from article directories, Synonym & Brand anchors from directories. My link building shcedule is as inconsistent as possible. I just keep around 50 links per week. I do social sharing, guest blogging with exact/synonym anchor text links and also I link to other pages across the whole site. I try to avoid site bar and footer links although I have some because it's partner links, I didn't buy them. I even asked web masters to put nofollow tag to those link after the drop because I was concerned that Penguin considers them bought links. The result: 1st keyword is going quite well, it reached 5th postion but after that dropped to the second page, which more or less I can explain with various factors such as overal keyword competition, maybe penguin thought that some links are spammy. The problem is that the second keyword is disaster. I found it in SERP after 1 month hard work on 17th page and now it is swinging between 14th and 17th page. Honestly, I am confused. Is it possible that link building with 2 keywords to the same page creates self canibalization of some kind? Just to remind that the 2 keywords are quite different, i,e. there are not related as synonyms or similar. Do you guys have had similar problem? Thanks in advance for your advice
Link Building | | VasilTasev0 -
Low Traffic, All Branded Keywords
I have a client that is strong locally - and the majority of the (converting) traffic that she gets is through branded keywords. Her traffic is at about ~200 visits a month. She is ranking for some non-branded keywords, but is in a highly competitive niche - gift baskets - and isn't converting for non-branded keywords. The domain authority of the website is at 27, with the homepage authority at 39. Because she is already strong locally I don't necessarily see the need to build local citations for her. What strategies would you suggest to help increase the traffic and conversion of her website? It isn't a new website - the domain was purchased in 2002. I'm just at a loss here in terms of what we can do as an SEO company to help her build an audience - we have already been writing guest posts for publication for her, and she doesn't have the budget for high-cost directories that would really help her authority. We haven't really ventured into conversion rate optimization or multivariate testing - but I feel like what needs to happen right now is the boosting of her traffic overall. What say you all?
Link Building | | MountainMedia0 -
Link to my site not showing up in Open Site Explorer
If a link to my site on another domain does not appear in the list of links gathered by the Open Site Explorer, does that mean that this backlink will not be crawled by search engine bots? Is there anything I should do to make sure that this link IS crawled and/or recognized by search engines coughGooglecough?
Link Building | | robgleslie0 -
New to all this, any suggestion will be appreciated
I operate an Airport Parking Agency or Secure Car Parking. Any ideas on keywords would be greeeeeeeat 😉
Link Building | | ginag0