Thanks. Awesome videos. Basically you recommend using 33% keywords. How many of these would be exact, partial and "LSI" - related keywords match? I guess 11 - 11 - 11.
Thanks! But that's not what I actually said...
In video #2 I say:
1. The top 10 most-used anchors to your page, and their percentages of use in the overall list.
'Ideal' percentages and ratios vary, depending on the sector or market you're in. But generally, to be safe; we've found that no more than 10% of your inbound anchors should contain any single keyword-phrase - especially one that has been optimised on-page. e.g. if the exact-match term 'weight loss diets' appears more than 10% of the time, then that search-term runs the risk of being penalised for that page. It doesn't necessarily mean it will of course, but the chances start to increase the higher the percentage is...
3. Whether a few 'root' keywords are continually repeated; thus increasing their individual word density.
This is the area that most commonly confuses everyone, but it's very important to understand, as otherwise your link-building efforts to dilute your anchor-profile can be a complete waste of time.
Google parses anchor-text phrases using the individual 'root' keywords that makeup that phrase. When they look at 'weight loss diets' as an anchor-text, they see an anchor for 'weight', an anchor for 'loss', and an anchor for 'diets'. This is kind of obvious really, and why we can get a lot of long-tail rankings from using a variety of keywords. But people often don't make the reverse connection when it comes to over-optimisation.
Therefore, if you had 100 unique anchor phrases from 100 different links, then it sounds like you're completely safe from Penguin; as you never exceed 1% individual phrase-density. But what if all those keywords were extensions/long-tails of 'weight loss diets'?
i.e. 'rapid weight loss diets', 'successful weight loss diets', 'top weight loss diets uncovered' etc.
They're all different when considered as a single, stand-alone exact-match phrase, but they end up with a 100% density of the root keywords 'weight', 'loss' and 'diets'. You can pretty much guarantee that you'll be penalised for the phrase 'weight loss diets' and also 'weight loss' etc.
This is why it's so important to use a variety of 'root' keywords and LSI/synonym keywords to break up the overall density of your keyword-phrases. Yes; you want to use extenders and modifiers heavily to vary your exact-match anchor-phrases and provide lots of variety - thus helping you with point 2. But you also need to use a decent variety of base keywords in the first place, as otherwise you end up in the scenario we've just explained.
However, the ratios for this are NOT the same or as strict as the 10% in point 1. We generally find that as long as your root keywords are below 30-40% (we use a third as a guideline) in terms of overall density throughout all the anchors, you won't experience many problems.
Using EMD/PMD URL's (which are inherently keyword-rich) aren't as bad as simple keyword phrases either. You can get away with a higher percentage of URL/naked anchors that are exact/phrase-match domains, as Google seems to go easier on these, by virtue of the fact that they're brand/URL anchors - and a more 'natural' anchor-text to use for linking anyway.
So...
It's therefore around 10% max ( as an average ) for exact match phrases, but using 'root' keywords more than 33% of the time across the entire profile - in any part of a single anchor - can start to massively increase the chances of penalisation for that root keyword.
Jay
