Anchor text: succinct or expansive?

[GAustralia]

Hello Search Watch-

Anchor text: succinct or expansive. I have noted SEO firms tending toward very succinct anchor text for links. If the main "keyword" you are after in your anchor text is three words long, is there any harm to this objective to tacking a few more words on this to say make a six word keyword - to hope to get more "bang for your buck" from the anchor text?

GAustralia

[goodroi]

do you want a succinct or expansive answer? i'm feeling generous so i'll give both.

succint - its generally best to focus your anchor text

expansive - search engine are freakishly complex. you need to be careful that the anchor text is not too concentrated (spam penalty) or diluted (too little seo boost). to take this to an extreme imagine if for anchor text you put in a full paragraph. do you really think you are going to rank for every word in that paragraph? it is best to vary but still focus your anchor text around what you are trying to rank for.

i would suggest you read the search engine patents about latent semantic indexing and phrase based indexing. this will help you to better understand what is going inside of the search engineers minds.

ps im not even going to bring in the issue of surrounding text and other elements.

[AussieWebmaster]

varying anchor text works

[jag]

Just think, if you are the user how would you like to navigate without repeating the same anchor links in the content. That will do.

Best.

[SEORockStar]

Hey guys all these days i did not know the meaning of succinct and expansive , but after reading this read i came to know.

[GAustralia]

Hello goodroi-

Thanks for your explanation. Lots of results for LSI.

Please expand on this one:

"ps im not even going to bring in the issue of surrounding text and other elements."

GAustralia

[GAustralia]

Goodroi -

Wondering if you believe succint may also have benefits to HTML Title and HTML content if you wanted focus on a keyword. And in this case I mean succint as in less than the number of characters that Google would typically show in the search results.

GAustralia

[AussieWebmaster]

that's a hard one - it seems sometimes to help but since we never know the algo it is a guess