does the order of keywords matter? for example if you have the phrase "learn how to play soccer" can you change it to "learn and understand how to play soccer" and get searches for "learn how to play soccer" and "understand how to play soccer" thanks
dev17, yes, you are right. That's why it is better to choose long tail keywords to optimize your article.
You can add anything before or after the actual keyword, but if you want to rank for it, then you can't change the order of any words in the keyword.
dev17, I can prove you that the order of keywords doesn't matter. You can PM me and I will show you the SERPs of my website which is optimized for a long tail keyword but ranks well for many other keywords.
I agree, from what I have seen the keywords don't have to have a certain order, they just have to be present in your article. The best strategy is to mention the long-tailed keyword in your title, at least two to three times in your article and then have it be the words that are clicked on in the hyperlink instead of "click here." If you can purchase a domain name with the most important keywords in the domain name, and have all of these present in one article, you are well on your way to have optimized your article for the search engines.
I would try and get the phrase or something very close in the title and in the article once or twice. Don't go crazy, but don't forget to include them at least a bit.
It always depend on what you want to achieve, Let's say you want to optimize and rank for the keyword "learn how to play soccer" you definitely have to keep that keyword in that order.. However the same article (learn how to play soccer) may still be found if people type in google ..."learn and understand how to play soccer" See... but if you want a "learn and understand how to play soccer" article to show up instead of a "learn how to play soccer" article, you would have to optimize it with the proper keywords... Hope I didnt confuse you!