3 Simple Steps to keyword order SEO – Are your words SEO friendly?

Much search engine optimization revolves around guessing how users will search to find your site. When you’re optimizing for organic (non-paid) search results, you may be surprised to find out how much word order impacts the search ranking.

Optimize your website for organic search with varying keyword order

If you search the major search engines, you will find that the order of your keywords makes a huge difference on where your website ranks. Let’s use Katz Web Services as an example, shall we?

SEO Denver or Denver SEO?

Keyword	Google Rank	Yahoo! Rank	Bing Rank
SEO Denver	6	1	11
Denver SEO	6	42	8
Difference:	0	41	3

As you see, word order makes a huge impact in rank.

How to order keywords for SEO: 3 solutions.

1. Use SEO’d breadcrumbs to your website’s advantage

WordTracker.com has an article about keyword order optimization:

I knew that both the singular and plural forms of the word “loan” were important. And I knew that over 40,000 searches per month were too important to ignore. So I came up with the breadcrumb trail:

Home > Loans > Home Loan

As you can see in this breadcrumb trail, I have accommodated the reverse word order and the natural word order.

This solution is brilliant; if you look, Google would read: “Home Loans” and “Home Loan” and “Loans Home”. This kind of outside-the-box thinking is great, but this example could be quite technical if you’re not building the site yourself.

2. Use keyword variations in your title and headlines for maximum coverage

Search engines love title tags, and they love headlines – especially H1 and H2.  So take the key phrases that you’d like to be ranked for, and throw them in a virtual blender, adding some variations as you go.  What combinations can you come up with that sound natural?

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Now you’ve got a proper content arsenal. Use one variation in your title tag, another in your post slug, and sprinkled in your content headlines and text.

How do you know which words are the best for your website SEO? That’s the next step: see which keywords and phrases have the biggest bang.

3. Find which keyword combinations get more search engine traffic

This may seem obvious, but it’s very important: once you’ve got a great list of key phrases, take them over to the Google Keyword Tool or Overture Keyword Selector Tool and get an idea which phrases get the most search engine traffic. If you haven’t already, throw your city or state into your keyphrases and see what happens.

Including these derivations in your content means that your copy has a greater chance of finding the correct keyword order for the organic search, with a real world result of ranking higher for that phrase.

Summary of thoughts

In order to get the best results for your keyword and keyphrase, don’t stick to the term you HOPE users will search for. Optimize your website for as many combinations and permeations as possible.

By using clever tricks like using the breadcrumb, finding great combinations, and finding which phrases have the best result, your website will be ranking better for a broader range of searches.