If you’ve read anything about seo, you know that the most important aspect to help you rank in the SERP’s is building links that contain keyword phrases in the anchor text.

Some people miss the “anchor text” part. Unfortunately, if you get a whole bunch of links with no keyword phrases in them or that contain your site name, then at best all you’ve done is help your site rank for your site name. Obviously, this is not the goal. Of course, you should be pushing hard to rank for relevant keyword phrases.

Now before you go out and start putting keyword phrases in your links lets stop and get organized first. This is where clusterizing your phrases comes into place.

Every page on your site has a good chance of ranking for a few keyword phrases. No page has a good chance of ranking for all your phrases. That said, you need to assign clusters of phrases to each URL. When that is done, you will know which phrases need to be included in both on site and off site optimization for each URL.

How To Cluster Your Phrases

Take one URL at a time and create its cluster. Lets use this URL to help explain the process I go through when clusterizing: skincarerx.com/obagi.html.

1. Decide on the main phrase of the URL. In this case, it was easy to choose the main phrase–the brand name Obagi. Generally speaking the main phrase of the web page, and therefore the cluster, is going to be the highest searched for phrase that is relevant to the page.
2. Use a keyword research tool like freekeywords.wordtracker.com to help find the sub phrases of this cluster. After I type obagi into Wordtracker I see:
3. Choose the phrases that are the most relevant to the URL in question and that have the highest search volume. In this case, I chose:
   1. obagi
   2. obagi skin care
   3. obagi nu derm
   4. obagi products
   5. obagi blender
   6. obagi skin care products
   7. obagi tretinoin

I like to keep track of these clusters in an excel sheet with the URL listed at the top of its perspective cluster.

Once you have a cluster for a specific URL, you can then optimize that page. These are the phrases that will be the anchor text in all the links that are pointed to this specific URL. As you get links, you can vary the anchor text and help this one page rank for all these phrases. The nice thing is that all these phrases contain the main phrase “obagi” and therefore every link will help the main phrase as well as a sub phrase! Don’t forget that internal links count as well. All internal links that point to this URL should include one of these phrases. (Most likely all internal links will say the same thing; they won’t be varied).

Also, the phrases in the cluster will be used to create an effective title tag and for best practice should be used within header tags and within the content of the page itself.

As you can see, I didn’t use all the phrases that Wordtracker showed me in this one cluster. It’s a good idea to limit each cluster to 10 or less phrases. All the other relevant phrases that are searched for quite a bit can be broken up into several clusters that each point to different URL’s.

Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments down below. I would love to clarify anything that you don’t understand.