Importance of exact matches in Google?

How important is an exact keyword phrase match

[dnyren]

After weeks of debating I was finally able to convince people the importance of Title Tags and making sure they are descriptive and keyword rich and not just one word as previously was the case. Anyway as we begin to move forward some questions have arose about how Google ranking treats exact versus non-exact matches? That is, if someone is entering country names in Google, are we going to appear lower because it has extra words?

No I know the second question is definitely not true but figured it would let you better understand what I was asking about.

[jonrichd]

Google uses many factors in ranking pages for keywords, one of which is the text in the title tag. For that reason, I think it's hard to say whether having addditional words in the tag will affect your rankings for a given keyword, because that's only one ingredient in the soup.

That being said, you might want to start having some debates about total traffic, and more importantly, traffic that converts for you. For example, if you are presently getting 10 hits per day for your single keyword title page, and then by changing that title to four words, the number of hits for keyword drops to five, but the number of hits for keyword phrases in the new title goes to 50, you may actually be better off.

Also, single kewords may bring traffic, but may not convert. For example, 'widgets' may get a lot of traffic, but you don't know why those visitors were searching: did they want background info, to purchase widgets, or what. Conversely 'buy widgets' or 'prices for model A72 widget' pretty much tells you what the visitor wants. Even though there may be fewer overall searches for these terms, you may get better conversions.