"widget city" vs "widget in city"

Does Google and other SEs treat these differently?

[patrick89]

Hi,

Does the use of a connecting word (such as "in") w/in on-site copy reduce the keyword density of the keyphrase according to SEs? Eg..

"widget city" vs "widget in city"

Thanks,
Patrick

[tedster]

Have you done the searches? It's clear that those two phrases can give different results. There's more going on than "density", however - in fact, I'm not even sure density is a metric that's in use today, at least not directly. Things are much more sophisticated than that with today's algorithms.

[Serpent]

"widget city"
"widget in city"
"widgets city"
"widgets in city"
"city widget"
"buy widget city"
"buy widget in city"

All of these yield different results. They are searched for in different volumes and with varying intent on the part of the searchers. You would do well to put a great deal of time researching which keywords to target, from the obvious "trophy" terms to the looooong tail. Based on that, craft copy incorporating as many terms as you can while remaining readable and easy to follow. Understanding that Google (and basically all other search engines) treat these queries differently is essential for SEO.