How important are exact keywords in your anchor text?

[daracreative]

Hi Guys,

I’m relatively new to SEO. I’ve recently started working for a website design company and am in the process of changing the anchor text in the footer of all of our clients sites.

At the moment most of them read “graphic design & web development by dara creative” with anchor text being dara creative taking you to our home page. As you can see we are not fully taking advantage of the keywords that could have a higher impact. So I’ve done some keyword research and I hope to concentrate my efforts on the following keywords as the anchor text leading to the home page; website design Dublin, website design Ireland, web developemt Dublin and web design Ireland so it may read something like

“web design Dublin by dara creative”

However this doesn’t read so well as people may think that the company might be called “web design Dublin”. So the alternative might be “web design in Dublin by dara creative”.

So my question is which would rank better? Does google rank the exact searched keywords higher than broader searched words?

Any help on this matter would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

rob

[RyanKent]

Rob, anchor text is important but footer links are low value. I wouldn't focus the links with that level of detail. For your company, I would simply recommend using your company's name. If your company name is Acme Web Design then the footer look would be something like "Developed by Acme Web Design". The text "Acme Web Design" would form the anchor text and link to your home page.

[Websensejim]

Anchor text is important but you don't need that many exact matches. If you concentrate on getting brand links (from strong domains), then you only need a few keyword matching anchor text links. You should also vary the anchor text bu using plurals, stop words and modifiers.

[SEM-Freak]

Hi Rob, I know an agency that got a penalty for doing exactly what you are doing. It's not worth going back and changing old links - maybe if you significantly change the copy in a blog post but not footer links. Leave them as they are and for new footer links go branded as Ryan suggests - you need to build a brand.

In Ireland it is useful to get a load of .ie links - don't worry too much about the anchor text - just get the local domains.

With this kind of foundation, you will only need a handful of keyword rich links. try to get as natural looking a profile as possible.

[Dan-Petrovic]

In a natural situation brands typically get exact anchor text only if it's their brand "acme plastering" and not for what they want to rank for "plastering london". If Google starts seeing 100% exact match on all your anchor text you're going to raise a few flags with them. Including what you do is a good idea next to the brand like it was suggested above.

[Truedesign]

I would agree with Ryan, just use the company name, looks better and works better.