I am choosing a new set of keywords to optimise for. I am someone who has made the mistake of optimising for words that nobody looks for. Big pain. O To help me avoid making the same mistake again: I am never sure of this: if I optimise for a multi-word phrase like 'chocolate ice cream london' then how much benefit do I get off the back of that for 'ice cream london'? or 'london chocolate ice cream'? or 'chocolate ice cream in london'? What I mean is how much jumbling of words do I get 'for free'? Presumably it's different for different search engines? I know it's a matter of opinion!
For Google the keyword phrases need to make sense in the context of natural language. Read about LSI and forget trying to place keyword phrases in the exact order unless it makes sense. Google has millions or even billions of lines of Latent Semantic Indexed text to compare and draw from. So you are not optimizing so much as "including" the phrase chocolate ice cream, London. Throw your zip code (Postal Code uk?) in their on the page as well. If you write crazy like used to work. Get local London chocolate ice cream at out london ice cream store. It will read and look unnatural. You used to be able to include exact phrases then just optimize for the keyword density. Then you had to worry about proximity. And it worked!!! Those days are behind us with Google. Still works some in Yahoo, but you have to have a fair amount of incoming exact keyword phrased links (but not so many as to set off a filter). Crazy online world! The good news is that writing naturally around a topic is actually easier. Getting those anchor text incoming keyword links is a little bit harder.
So in choosing keyword phrases, does that mean that chocolate ice cream london is the same thing as london chocolate ice cream? Can anyone recommend a book or site for beginners but that goes into some depth on this stuff? Thanks for help!
use this tool - http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ it is a free online tool that gives you a detailed statistics for the most searched keywords. Find which word/words are being searched the most and then you will have a course for your boat, if i can put it that way.
"So in choosing keyword phrases, does that mean that chocolate ice cream london is the same thing as london chocolate ice cream?" No, it's not the same. It depends on the different competitoin for "chocolate" and "london" and on searchers habits (search frequency for one or the other phrase). If you want to go for both, you should place the term with the stronger competition first. It will cost you more efforts to rank high, but finally you will rank better for both terms.