awkward wording!

[Isabelnewth]

I am trying to put in a set key phrase: 'why switch gas and electricity' as per article request: its an awful clunky one to get in naturally, and I tried, as someone suggested in another thread, splitting it between sentences like this: .......why switch? Gas and electricity......But when I held control and typed f to identify occurrences of the key phrase, that one didn't show up. Does that mean that on a Google search or whatever, it wont show so that it doesn't 'count''? Any other ingenious ideas gratefully acknowledged.....

[EFowler]

I've just had a quick google and found this:

'Having said that, Google all but ignores punctuation when its spiders crawl through your pages to identify context. This gives you a great opportunity to work in clumsy keywords. A period or comma in the middle of your keyword phrase has no effect on its ranking power'

Whether that's completely true or not, I don't know, buy may give you some comfort that you're doing the right thing!

[Isabelnewth]

Ah thanks! I wonder if that applies to question marks...but it's reassuring anyway. Cheers.

[jak]

I think it applies to all punctuation marks. I used to even break a keyword phrase with a new paragraph, but have recently been asked not to do that any more. Being able to use the end and start of a phrase or sentence is a great help though.

[contentwriter]

I've read before that you can put punctuation between keywords like that.

I've just had a quick google and found this:

'Having said that, Google all but ignores punctuation when its spiders crawl through your pages to identify context. This gives you a great opportunity to work in clumsy keywords. A period or comma in the middle of your keyword phrase has no effect on its ranking power'

Whether that's completely true or not, I don't know, buy may give you some comfort that you're doing the right thing!

Off-topic but, EFowler, looks like the author you quoted has a dangling modifier. Safe to assume he/she doesn't write for CC?

[ReneeF]

I found the following links helpful:

http://conventionallanguage.blogspot.co ... rding.html

https://www1.villanova.edu/content/vill ... tences.pdf

I've gotten the same rejection response recently. Now I am on a hunt to create a checklist for any possible mistakes I could make.

[Lysis]

People who worry about this level of detail (from an SEO standpoint not grammar) are on a road to panda issues.

[McCoy]

The best SEO content is compelling content which gets shared socially. Spider food stopped being a thing a few years ago and can get you seriously penalized these days.

[Isabelnewth]

Yes, I expect that's true, but the article request specified that wording so it had to be done....

[ReneeF]

I suspect that the editors are bouncing back these articles for "awkward wording" for a grammatical aspect and also to improve their bottom line. I suspect they are less worried about spiders and SEO than readability and smooth text. Therefore, being even more of a perfectionist than the editors here would be profitable and get articles accepted quicker.

[Angie H]

Yes, you can divide keyword phrases with punctuation. Google will still recognize them. However, you can't split it up using a heading:

<h2>Utilities - Why Switch?</h2>

<p>Gas and electricity...</p>

This is because Google crawls h-tags separately from paragraphs, so they're seen as separate objects. It still counts thanks to semantics and Googlebot's ability to identify the meaning of pages. Keyword phrases are becoming less important, but when required by the client, they really should be undetectable. (For those interested, an example of ranking a page without using keywords can be found here http://youtu.be/snIPeWyw1kE?t=16m52s where the Hummingbird and Author Rank took over.)