14 replies to this topic

[RisaBB]

Hello,

If my keyword phrase is "New York Elder Law and Estate Planning Attorney," would a SE index it for the following phrases?:

- Elder Law Attorney
- New York Estate Planning Attorney

Thanks.

Risa

[Jill]

Yes, if you optimize the site correctly, you will have a chance at ranking highly for those various phrase parts.

Also:

New York Elder Law
Estate planning attorney
elder law
elder law and estate planning

etc.



Jill

[qwerty]

It's true that if you've got all the words of a search on your page, you'll show up somewhere in the SERPs, but I've found that having the exact phrase on which a user is searching is best. Do a few searches on 3 or 4 word phrases on Google, and you'll find that in many cases the snippet for the top site will show the exact phrase.

You should check your logs and see what trends you find. You may want to write new pages that are optimized for those specific phrases.

[Jill]

Ooops! Yes, Bob is correct. I thought that the smaller phrases you pulled out were exact matches.

It will be much harder to be found for phrases that aren't exact matches. Yes, on the ones I mentioned, but no on the ones you mentioned. There's a possiblity, but you have to use them in the exact order if you really want to rank highly for them.

Sorry for that mix up! Shoulda had more coffee this morning before answering!



Jill

[mcanerin]

I optimised a page for "city" "product" because that's how people were looking for it, then after getting a #1 ranking on Google in it I decided to check on "product" "city", which is way harder to write copy for so I didn't

It was ranked #2, with the one right above it ranked because they made the Title "blah blah "product" ("City", state, etc)" I hadn't thought of using puctuation like brackets to do this, but now a whole new world has opened up, copywise

[compar]

Carrying this subject a little further Wordtracker results seem to be based on people putting their search terms within " ". If you experiment searching on a specific search phrase with and without the double quotes you will find quite startling different results.

Now my question is does anyone have any statistics on how many people actually enclose their search terms in " ". My guess is that very few do. So does that tend to invalidate some of the result that Wordtracker offers?

[dimok]

I think exact prazes is not needed for rare queries. But for popular searches exact phraze it almost always should br used.

Carrying this subject a little further Wordtracker results seem to be based on people putting their search terms within " ".

I think you absolutely wrong. Supposelly there are not so much if any quoted searches for most phrazes. Especially, for single word searches

[dragonlady7]

I and most of my very computer-literate friends use quotes in searches for specific things. I most often use quotes around phrases, but my search would be, say, "blue widgets" city, state, cheap, "shiny coat" where within quotes would be phrases that always occur in that order, and outside quotes would be words that can happen in any order relative to the others.
If everyone searched that way, though, the SEO world would be a different place, I think. I do think many people are aware that you can use quotes, but I'm not sure that so many actually use them. Nor do I know where you can get any information on that topic, so I'm really not being very helpful... sorry.

But those above are correct-- if your target phrase is highly competitive, you're best to try and find a way to incorporate the exact phrase into your copy. If it's less competitive, it doesn't matter what order the words are in because it will show up for any of them. But anyone with the exact phrase searched for will rank higher than anyone without it. If someone searches with quotes, anyone without the exact phrase won't show up at all, but the few people who do know t use quotes also tend to know that.

[qwerty]

At least according to my logs, I get very few hits from people searching with quotation marks. Of course, it's possible that there are a ton of people searching that way, and they just aren't entering anything I have in exact text. But my number 1 search term for one site is one that I know I've got exactly, in a number of places, and I find people searching on that exact phrase fairly often -- and far more often without quotes than with.

[compar]

and I find people searching on that exact phrase fairly often -- and far more often without quotes than with.

My real question if you read my original post in this thread was, given that a lot of people do not enclose their search phrases within quotes -- nobody has subtantiated otherwise -- The fact that net savvy searchers know about and use qotes doesn't prove anything. There are vastly more NON savvy searcher out there than knowledgable searchers.

But back to my question; given that wordtracker results are always based on quotation enclosed phrases does this diminish the value and usefulness of their information?

[qwerty]

What is it about WordTracker that tells you that it only gives results of searches run with quotes? I'm not saying that you're definitely wrong, but I've never seen anything that would indicate that.

If you're comparing WordTracker results to searches run on Google, you need to remember that WT isn't based on Google searches. They get their data from metasearch engines.

[websage]

Here is another tool you might what to consider -- I use it sometimes to see what phrase brings more responses:

http://www.compare-stuff.com/

Hope this helps,

Mitko @ WebSage

[Mel]

Carrying this subject a little further Wordtracker results seem to be based on people putting their search terms within " ". If you experiment searching on a specific search phrase with and without the double quotes you will find quite startling different results.

Now my question is does anyone have any statistics on how many people actually enclose their search terms in " ". My guess is that very few do. So does that tend to invalidate some of the result that Wordtracker offers?

Hi Compare;
Wordtracker results are not based on searches only using quotes,that is only an option (which you can switch on of off) in the competition search step.

The reason for this is that this allows you to get competition results in either way, depending on which you feel is better.

[Jill]

But back to my question; given that wordtracker results are always based on quotation enclosed phrases does this diminish the value and usefulness of their information?

They're not!

The competition/KEI thing which I have stated is fairly useless does use quote searches to judge competition.

However, the regular results of how many searches there are for any given phrase, have nothing to do with quotes. They are searches exactly as WT shows them.

Jill

[awall19]

I think virtually nobody uses the " " when they search. I hate to not remember the source, but somewhere around 1 in 3 people think the first result is the most relevant to whatever they want. Even with the pecisism many people have I find it amazing that the # is that large.

If people can't find what they are looking for they rarely read the how to part, they just perform another search or just give up.

I do think those that really understand how search engines work, or those who work in technical fields do more frequently use the added options such as the " " or the ~, but on the whole I am sure these are features which collect dust

Learning about the internet is flat out my #1 hobby and I usually do not use the advanced features often, other than learning how to play with them sometimes.

The competition level only truely matters if you are a general unoptimized random web page. A million competitors may only have 2 optimized pages and 2 high ranking sites with unoptimized pages that can compete with a well optimized page.

The most important things about the words are the creativity with which they are picked and used.