Ranking For Non-Context-Friendly Terms Without Anchor-Text

[tonyflorespsa]

We are now at a point with Google where having a link profile that has a lot of exact match anchor text for a few main keyword targets is not a good thing.  So, how do we rank for terms that do not fit into the content of your site, but are still good keyword targets.

Here is an example from my situation.  A good keyword target for my area and business that I am working for is "plumber riverside" or "plumber riverside ca."  In a gramatical sense, these two/three words do not belong together in content, i.e they would not make a proper sentence being placed together, except with maybe a comma or period separating them.  In fact, this term probably wouldn't even make a good sidebar link copy.

Without having a link profile with "plumber riverside" as my most common anchor text, how can I let Google know that I should rank for this term?  Anchor text used to be the go to but now you have to really minimize the use of it for exact match terms.  Without on page content, it seems pretty hard.  Any thoughts?

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Tony,

It's important that you don't focus too heavily on having a link profile that is completely dominated by exact match anchor text. Realistically, one of your most used anchors should be branded text - which looks most natural (however, this isn't the case for every website). My advice would be to ensure that all of your landing pages are well optimised for the keywords and then the next stage can be including some local citations and co-occurance links.

Getting local citations from plumbing-related sites will allow the search engines to establish your site as relevant to those related keywords (it doesn't need to be exact-match). Also, if you are having some article links done then you could look at wrapping keywords around your anchor text link, for example - on my blog I try get links that are like this:

Matthew Barby is an SEO specialist based in Birmingham, UK. He enjoys ...

In the above sentence, my name would be the only hyperlink but Google/Bing/Yahoo are intellegent enough to relate the surrounding text with me so that I can start ranking for the links of Birmingham SEO Specialist (get it?). Try looking into this and it will diversify your link profile nicely

Matt

[tonyflorespsa]

I think the next stage of the game for me is learning more about co-citation and co-occurrence.  Seems like that is where everything is headed.  Thanks Matt!