Basic SEO Questions

[Justin Philipps]

I have a question guys.

Is it possible to rank for a keyword that's not even mentioned on your article or page? If possible, how does that happen?

For example, if I have a site that's talking about gymnastics, is it possible to rank for the keyword "sports lessons" or "gymnastics school" if the word is not even mentioned on the site?

And how does a page get better keyword rankings? Is it the backlinks from "exact phrase anchor text" that makes a page rank for a certain keyword? For example, I want the website to rank for "gymnastics school", should I always use that word on every article backlink and use it as the anchor text?


Thanks for the answers!

 

[StasVa]

There are 2 conditional factors

Relevance - fully depends from your content and description.
(Google figures out about is your page)

Domain authority - depends on backlinks.
(Google firures out about how expert or authority is you article, service and so one)

What you need to understand, that Google rank pages not website. So if on your Gymnastics school website will be an article or a tutorial about sport lessons or gymnastics school it will rank for those keywords even if your home page are ranking with absolutely other keyword.

2.About anchor text.
Few years ago, the anchor text had influence on ranking, now if there is any influence it's not essential. I will say it could be a spam signal for Google. Because many backlinks with the same anchor looks unnatural.

 

[SEOPub]

Yes, it is very possible. Happens all the time.

Google has incorporated a lot of latent semantic indexing into their search algorithm. You can learn more about that on your own, but it basically means that Google is getting better and better at understanding context and the overall meaning of a webpage and how it relates to similar topics.

It would be easier to rank if the content appeared on the page, but it's not nearly as big of a deal as it used to be.

Anchor text in links will definitely help, but it doesn't have to be exact anchor text either. You could use partial matches or closely related terms. If you were trying to rank for "gymnastics school" you could use things like:

local gymnastics school
best rated gymnastics schools
schools for gymnastics
gymnastics training centers
training center for gymnastics
local gymnastics classes

Just a few ideas off the top of my head.

The best public example of this is for the term "click here".

This page ranked #1 for probably a decade for that term, and it wasn't because they were trying to.

https://get.adobe.com/reader/

Nobody tries to rank #1 for "click here". There is no money in it. It was because of all of the links using the anchor "click here" or "click here to download adobe reader", etc.

The phrase "click here" does not appear on that page anywhere, and neither do the individual words "click" or "here".

It has recently dropped down to #4 or #5, but is still a good example.

2.About anchor text.
Few years ago, the anchor text had influence on ranking, now if there is any influence it's not essential. I will say it could be a spam signal for Google. Because many backlinks with the same anchor looks unnatural.

I don't buy that at all. First, anchor text still plays a significant role. See my example above about Adobe.

Second, I have never seen any credible evidence that anchor text is a spam signal. Low quality links were always the problem. Most spammers used to use the same anchor text, so they would have thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of links with the same anchors. Sure, if you have 200,000 links and 195,000 of them are the same anchor that might be odd. Really though, it was the crap quality links causing problems for people.

What if I created the world's best online mortgage calculator and embedded it into a webpage? Isn't it likely that almost all of the links I attract are going to use the anchor "mortgage calculator" or "online mortgage calculator"?

So Google is going to penalize the page for that? Of course not.

 

[Brandfuge]

Yes, possibly we can able to rank that type of keywords with the help of backlinks. We need to built quite large amount of backlinks to do that magic.

With onsite optimization alone you cannot even rank that keyword which is not even mentioned in the article.

Google latent symantic indexing helps to rank the synonyms of the keyword. Like wise gymnastics is a kind of sports. So we can rank it. But we cannot rank the unrelated keyword I mean a keyword which is totally unrelative.