Longer Tail Keyword for URL and Anchor text
-
Hello
If I am trying to rank for the term blue widgets as a primary, and also the term shiny blue widgets , and big shiny blue widgets as secondary - would the url /blue-widgets or /shiny-blue-widgets or /big-shiny-blue-widgets be better (all else equal)
- Would the word shiny / big dilute or affect of KW in the domain for the rankings for blue widgets (all esle equal)
- Regarding anchor text of inbound links, if the anchor text is shiny blue widgets, is that going to help me rank for both queries "blue widgets" and "shiny blue widgets" equally? (all else equal), or would including shiny, affect my ranking for "bliue widgets"
- Or is it better to keep the anchor text as just blue widgets (of course we could vary it) but Im trying to get a feel for how that would work as we are builfing some links I can control the anchor text.
I hope this was clear enough
Thanks
Sam
-
In my opinion...
1. I would use the most descriptive URL for the product at hand. That being said, if you want to rank for all three keyword variations, I would go with /big-shiny-blue-widgets.
2. No, inbound anchor text of "shiny blue widgets" will not help the page rank equally for "blue widgets" and "shiny blue widgets". It will help both, but lean toward the latter. That being said, you want to vary the anchor text so this is almost a non-issue (see #3).
3. Vary the anchor text and include all three variations (and possibly others).
Here are some other things to consider...
1. The title of the page is a very important indicator for the search engines. If you want to rank for all three variations, you should use "big shiny blue widgets" in your title tag.
2. The content on the page (text) should include all three variations of the text you want to rank for - without stuffing it in. This is a tough one to call out a rule for. If you read the text and it sounds too keyword heavy, it probably is.
3. Another place to inject the keywords you want to rank for is in relation to images of said products. You could include specific product descriptions as captions and in the image alt tag.
4. The page description is another place to possible put all three variations. However, this could be considered overkill. Also, don't forget people will be looking at this text in the SERPs. You want the description to be compelling to a human as well as a searchbot or else your clickthrough rate may suffer.
5. The competitive landscape of the product at hand is important to consider. If you are trying to rank for multiple variations of an obscure keyword set, you may find it easy to rank well for all three keyword variations without a lot of link building. If, on the other hand, you are attempting to rank for highly competitive keywords, you may find yourself needing to pick one to focus on or build lots of links.
Hope this helps! If anyone else feels differently, I would love to hear what you have to say.
-
In my opinion it would be best to have some variation in the anchor texts but if the URL is exact. I'm assuming that in this case 'blue widgets' is a highly competative keyword, so you might want to consider the 'long tail' keywords and optimise your URL for those longtail keywords, in this case /shiny-blue-widgets. You will probably get ranked easier this way. But it all depends on the current competition.
Good luck!
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
-
Maintaining or improving keyword ranking
I started a second website recently and it is doing very well. I am on the first page for a competitive keyword - spot 5 according to Moz. It is actually a category page that is ranking so well which is a surprise to me as I have read many times that I should deindex category pages due to duplicate content! My questions: 1. How do I get backlinks to a CATEGORY page?! I have been able to get backlinks to certain posts because my website is a deal blog and other deal blogs give me credit for popular deals by linking to my post. 2. How can I maintain this high ranking? Of course I want in spot 3 but this website isn't even 2 months old so I know I should be patient. At this point, I just want to stay on the first page. What is the best way to do that? I am about to fill out the SEO stuff for the category page which I haven't done yet.Thanks!
Link Building | | dealblogger0 -
Anchor text after the recent Panda update
Hi everyone, I just read this article: http://goo.gl/GkgUr and I can confirm this is true because one of my websites drastically lost its rank last week due to high percentage of targeted keyword within back links. Thus, what I'm worrying about is the anchor text within back links. I'm about to launch a new web site soon that will be publishing lots of landing pages for a travel niche. What I initially thought is to optimize landing page by page, so when the current page ranks well to move on to next one and so on. I thought that, by ranking a single landing page well, will have some positive impact to the rest of landing pages. But, after a lot of time spent on studying link building strategies, I decided to spread back links among landing pages equally. I will try to get as much as possible back links from the relevant content and high quality sites (press releases, guest posting, link exchange, social networks promotion). Please correct me on this one if you disagree. According to the above article, the recent google panda update calculates a percentage of keywords among anchor text and it would be the best to keep those at less than 30%, including "link", "here", "domain.com" etc. For instance, lets say that my website counts 500 landing pages and every single one targets a different low competition exact keyword. So, if I start building back links equally for each of the landing pages and I want to cover each one with a back link from a relevant content, what should I use for the anchor text? Initially I thought the keyword should be the anchor text, but after I read the article I'm not so sure any more. I guess search engines would say something like: "Ok, there are 500 landing pages and 500 different anchor texts pointing to different pages that belongs to domain.com", perhaps this should increase TLD's authority but what will happen to the landing pages? Would search engines (primarily google) see them as a 100% single anchor text and harm the rank? I really appreciate your help. Thank you!
Link Building | | vlddlv0 -
Does posting on blogs with anchored backlinks do you any good?
My current strategy: I am ranking for keyword and site: Immigration Consultant I access the Fresh Web Explorer and search my keyword, then find the blogposts with High Authority where I can post using HTML and include my link in my signature, or sometimes the post has a link associated with the username. Now my question is this, does this count? will google even crawl the comments? can I aid the crawling process somehow? Any advice on creating relavent back-links is much appreciated. Thank you
Link Building | | thealika
Nikita0 -
Anchor Text Diversity Question
I had a general question, will I be penalized for using one anchor text 108 times? I did some reading and I read that Google will be less likely to penalize you if it is your brand name instead of like "make money fast" or another spammy type of anchor text? The anchor text that I used was our website name thanks.
Link Building | | ilyaelbert0 -
How to deal with over-optimised anchor text?
Hi, We took on a client a few months ago, who came to us after seeing a drop in rankings. After cleaning up the site, we concluded that their drop is more than likely down to over-optimised anchor text. The keywords that have mainly been affected are the ones that have a majority of links with the exact anchor text. The links have built using blog networks, articles and there are some comments thrown in for good measure. We have no way of getting them removed. Hmm, links can't hurt you!? So what is the best solution? Has anyone had any success over coming this issue? What sort of time scales are we looking at? Gareth
Link Building | | garethbrown0 -
Changing backlinks anchor text
Hi, I've read a few blog post here that suggests the strength of building links using your brand as an anchor text. This supposedly gives the site authority. Currently a chunck of the back links to my homepage are on generic terms i'm trying to rank for which doesn't seem to be working very well. I was thinking of contacting the various webmasters to change the anchor text to that of the site brand name but wondering if this will signal a manipulation of links to the search engines and potentially could be flagged as paid links? Has anybody done this before and what is the danger of doing this? Thanks Duke
Link Building | | clickangel0 -
Have I suffered a keyword specific penalty?
Hi all, We've been working on improving our ranking for a specific keyword for the past couple of months. Progress has been steady if not spectacular (it's a very competitive keyword). Last week we obtained (not bought!) a site wide link from a partner (nothing fishy, they are business partners in the same industry) as well as a link each from a relevant resource site and a directory with good PA/DA. The anchor text used on the new links is keyword rich. This week our rankings have fallen dramatically from page 2 to page 39 for our targeted page although other pages on our site still rank well for this keyword. The targeted page is still indexed by Google. Could Google just be reassessing our ranking for this page and it will return to its previous rank or is it likely it has received a keyword specific penalty? Thanks in advance.
Link Building | | Confetti_Wedding0 -
Trying to rank highly for specific keyword, any advice?
I run a boating site and its been live since early February. Most of my traffic comes from direct traffic or google, keyword "trawler blogs". However, I am trying to rank highly for the generic keyword "trawler" or "trawlers" and I've had very little success. My homepage just got an A from the on-page analysis for keyword trawler. I've also reached out to several other trawler sites to try to get a link from them, or a reciprocal link. Haven't had much traction. However, our site is listed on a bunch (10-12) trawler related blogs (mostly blogspot) in their blogrolls, although these don't show up in backlinks. Any advice would be great. Thank you!
Link Building | | jacobr2170