Re april 5th post on over optimization - need clarification blogging

[Doug_Hay]

I mainly do content creation for clients .e.g. site and blog on word press - then link the blogs to the related static page. I have been just linking to the static page using keywords that match the title tag keywords. Is that correct?

[DougRoberts]

Just to keep it natural so if you were to read it out loud to others it wouldn't sound odd. Just make sure you avoid hundreds of links with the same keyword specific anchor text. When you come to linking to your static pages, try and think about more than just getting those keywords into the anchor text for the search engines - also think about the real people reading your blog articles - make sure your anchor text properly describes what they will find if they click on the links. If you/re trying to move your human visitors towards your offerings then think about making your anchor text compelling and trying to get the benefits of your offering in there somewhere. Good luck!

[Doug_Hay]

Thanks very much for your help.

We always write quality, long content - around 500 words and include lots of variiety of the keywords in the body text and h2 tags. We are quite clever at writing sensible content around one or two major keyuwords that are the title tag of the static web page being linked to.

It seems odd to link from the blog using  similar words to the main keywords on the static page which may or may not have those exact words on the web page.

[danbocain]

There is no real right answer for the specific situation.  Whenever I'm linking to content, especially my own (or clients), I try to include the main focus keyword in the anchor text but also include other words that make sense.

For Example:

If you are targeting the keyword "landscapers upstate NY" it might look weird if you link to the article using that same anchor text, it doesn't really make sense. In this scenario, you'd be better off linking to that content with something like "Landscape companies located in upstate NY"

I know the example is pretty rough but I think it displays the idea pretty well.  The end result might be less anchor text love, but it'll make more sense from a user perspective and search engines can look at that and still get a good feel for what that page is really about based on the anchor text you used along with the content found on the particular page.