Keyword/phrase proximity

[nickturner922]

I'm curious about opinions regarding how the search algorithms treat multiple key phrases that may reside in one long tail key phrase. So for example:

If I'm optimizing for "New York Litigation Lawyer", would that also give me rankings for "New York Lawyer"?

My thought is that the former will be considered the primary keyword and rankings will improve mostly for that, but that the latter keyword could also possibly see some lift as well.

Thanks!

[Shakur]

Hi there,

A search term can be made up of a combination of keywords. The keyword proximity refers to the distance between the search term’s individual keywords. For example: a website contains the keywords that make up the search term “New York Lawyer” in the sentence “New York Lawyer Blake Discher specializes in corporate litigation”. The search term proximity between “New York” and “Lawyer” is excellent, zero words, but between “Lawyer” and “corporate” it is four words. The smaller the distance between a search term’s individual keywords, the more relevant it will be from a search engine’s point of view.

From an SEO standpoint, the sentence in italics above would be better written, “ _New York Lawyer Blake Discher _creates images for blah, blah, blah.” In this way all three of the search phrase words the searcher entered are next to one another.

Hope it helps you.

[MoosaHemani]

The shortest and sweetest answer to this is YES!

Long tail keywords are the combination of (mostly) of few head keywords and when you link to long tail it automatically benefit your short tail keywords too.

Personally I was trying to optimize for bigcommerce premium themes and get some links with the same anchor text and as a result my client was appearing on the first page for both bigcommerce premium themes as well as bigcommerce themes.

Hope this helps!