Comments on: Texas Holdem SEO

By: How to Think Outside of the Box

How to Think Outside of the Box — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 15:12:19 +0000

[...] tells you to avoid targeting super competitive phrases like “online poker” or “texas holdem“, ignore her and compete for those phrases anyway. If someone tells you not to trade links [...]

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:52:50 +0000

Thanks Randy, much appreciated. The point about the frequency of the different natural link anchors reflecting the search terms is so logical.

By: Randy Ray

Randy Ray — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:50:23 +0000

I’m sure Google has some understanding related to variations of certain phrases. For example, if you do a search for “Texas hold’em”, you’ll notice that “Texas holdem” is bolded in the title tag and description for some of the pages. That being said, I think it would be natural to see those same variations in your anchor text. If 35% of the people on the Internet spell “Texas holdem” when they’re doing a search, and 50% of them search for “Texas hold em”, and 15% search for “Texas hold’em”, then if you were programming the search engine, you’d expect natural link anchor text to reflect similar percentages.

I don’t spend a lot of time trying to get other people to link to me with the anchor text that I want though. I always just ask them to link to me with whatever anchor text THEY think is appropriate. That way I’m not involved in the anchor text decisions, and I never have to worry about an unnatural backlink profile. (i.e. my anchor text profile IS natural, because I let the owners of the sites choose it.)

So no, I don’t think you’d see poorer results across the board. I think you’ll get partial credit for all 3 variations no matter which variation gets used.

By: Greg

Greg — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:13:49 +0000

Randy, if you attempted to rank for [Texas Holdem], do you think that you would inadvertently end up ranking for the other possible searched variants like [Texas Hold em] and [Texas Hold'em]?

If not, do you think that including variants of the term in your text and varying your incoming links (where possible) would allow you to rank for all 3 terms? This is after putting in the equal amount of effort it would take to rank for just the one?

So (hypothetically speaking), instead of getting 100 links with “Texas Holdem” in there somewhere, mixing up you text and getting 33 with “Texas Holdem”, 33 with “Texas Hold em” and 34 with “Texas Hold’em”. Do you think you would see poorer results across the board than if you just focused on the one variant?