So here's a question that perhaps you SEO gurus can help me with. If I'm targeting the keyword phrase "Toronto blue widgets", and someone searches for "blue widgets Toronto", would search engines ignore the word order and still respect my ranking?
heh thats a tough one to say one way or the other. my initial thought frank would be that order does matter.
I know with MySQL MATCH queries on fulltext indexes the order doesn't matter I just wonder if Google indexes in a similar manner
Word order does matter. And that's pretty easy to test out. The easiest way is to look at a regional niche. And a small one. For instance one of my favorite sites I like to point out. www.bostonmassage.com Horrible website, crappy seo. But a small niche. Now do a google search on "Boston Massage", and then do a search on "Massage Boston". And you'll quickly see the difference. Do a few tests like that, and you'll see word order definitely plays a part. HTH, MR
After testing it out as much as possible, I agree AND disagree For small town related queries, I get precisely the same results. For city-related queries, I get different results, but only slightly
I think if you're talking a small town query then there is ZERO competition so of course it doesn't matter. If you have no websites in Podunk Mississippi then every search with podunk in it come up at top. It's the podunk that is ranking it not the keywords. And the keywords are really secondary. So in any search that has more than 100 websites in it, word order definitely does count. For the most part if you live in Podunk Mississippi slap any old website up, slap as many keywords as you can onto the page, and you'll rank for all of them. Doesn't mean that for the rest of the world keyword order doesn't matter. All things being equal you can prove it time and time again. Examples: Tucson Computer Repair, Computer Tucson Repair, Computer Repair Tucson Atlanta Body Shop, Body Shop Atlanta, Body Atlanta Shop Now I do agree with you that the numbers aren't THAT far off. But, they can be statistically significant. For one of my clients we were able to get Region + KW Phrase to #9, yet KW Phrase + Region is still stuck in around 35. Quite a bit of difference in the traffic you get from first page of google to 4th. M
It does matter. and the change can be big or small depending on how competitive the keywords are. If not so competitive, the change is usually small. If you have competitors who are doing lots of SEO, a slight word order could affect a lot on your rank at the SERP.
Thank you, that's exactly the kind of knowledgeable information I was looking for! Quick question then: in your experience, have you found that more people search for 'location [phrase]', or '[phrase] location', or is it a split?
I've found that [keyword] [location] was used about 3/4 of the time, and [location] [keyword] was used about 1/4 of the time. Getting into search-psychology, I believe the word that someone puts first is generally the most important. It's the one that is at the front of their mind. The words after that generally serve to refine the search. In most cases, this *should* mean you end up with [keyword] [location]. However in searches where the location is more important than the service or product offered, you'll find that the location comes before the keyword more often than not. An example of this might be in tourism related niches: e.g. Maui Resort New York Hotel Chattanooga Civil War Museum Las Vegas Holiday In these cases, the factor which is at the forefront of the person's mind is the location. So these niches would probably receive more [location] [keyword] related traffic. Brent P.S. - If this has been helpful, click my scales to give me some rep
I'm going to agree with the 3/4 {keyword}+ {Location}. That seems to bear out in my studies as well, to my chagrin after having a few websites created with {location} + {keywords}. M
Word order matters a lot in search terms and even a space (website, web site) can have a huge ranking change.
Word orders have a lot of influence in search results and that is why we try to include the exact target keywords on the begining of Title, Meta tags, Heading or content.
i think its not a problem . Search bots was read your blog posts in plain text only(HTML format) . Note: try to write reader friendly articles not for search engines , Google is your friend when you are writing articles for readers.