Forum Moderators: phranque
For example, my keyword is widget, or a keyword phrase widget service. In my sentences, I'll make a sentence with that keyword or keyword phrase included, but it is ENCLOSED with quotes, or even parenthesis, e.g. "widget", "widget service", (widget). Will search engines still recognize it as keywords?
The reason I ask is because the punctuation mark and the keyword is joined and search engines might not recognize it as a word, no?
Not only that, in HTML tags, I do the following <strong>“widget service”</strong>. Because I read that using strong or em tags is good for keywords, but I'm including the quotes (notice that I use HTML equivalent of "). Is that no good?
[edited by: phranque at 7:10 am (utc) on April 15, 2009]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
Just use your punctuation and your style mark-up in a natural way and have no concern about it. Search engines today have gone beyond basic text matching, anyway.
Because this character is used in many programming languages, it is treated as a literal by Google. That is, if you search for HTTP_HOST, you will get results as if HTTP_HOST were a single word. All of the others are treated as if they were spaces. Also, it won't matter whether you use literal punctuation characters or HTML-entities (such as ").
Unless your Web site has nothing valuable to offer and won't stand out any other way, I'd advise you to write and style your content for your visitors, and not for search engines. Using <strong> and <em> in order to get the search engines' attention may work (a little), but it's a good way to make your pages look cheap and spammy. And because these tags are used by screen-readers for the blind and the visually-impaired, using them too often and in inappropriate circumstances is a fairly bad idea.
Instead of spending too much time reading about achieving instant success through the use of <strong> and <em> markup, you might do better reading some of these threads [webmasterworld.com] -- and especially the last one listed.
Jim
