Well, it’s only five days until election day and CNN is saying things like, “It’s not over yet.” They just played a little montage of Sarah Palin blunders (“The Vice President is in charge of the Senate.”) that was quite amusing. From many angles, it looks as though the Republican party is ready to throw in the towel. And I found this:
And that is as political as I’m going to get.
This article is actually about SEO.
I have been doing a lot of keyword-based article writing lately. I like this sort of writing because not only do I get to research and write about something I (usually) don’t know much about, but I get the added challenge of figuring in search engine optimization. Today I encountered a question that hasn’t come up before for me: Do search engines care about punctuation?
I was working an article for a client and the keyword phrase included a question mark. It turned out to be very difficult to include essentially the same question more than once in an article and still make it read normally. Let me give you an example. Let’s say the keyword phrase is:
“not looking younger?”
You can easily create a readable sentence for that: “Trying all the products but still not looking younger?” The problem comes when you try to include that phrase again. Since I have already asked the question, it sounds awkward to suddenly ask it again, even in a different way or separated by a few paragraphs. Clients don’t need to know SEO, but they do expect articles to match what they request and to make sense when they are read by actual people.
I knew I could probably get away with omitting the question mark without complaint, but I figured that I probably wasn’t the first person to ask this question and now I was curious.
As it turns out – aside from @ and ” – search engines ignore punctuation. It is simply treated as a space in the text. In fact, one of the reasons for this is in order to allow for both optimization and readability when it comes to awkward keyword phrases. For example, let’s take the keyword phrase:
“dentist wisconsin”
Without altering the keyword by adding “in,” this keyword isn’t going to make any sense. However, because search engines are going to ignore punctuation, I can do something like this:
It is always a challenge to find a good dentist. Wisconsin has no shortage of choices.
See how sneaky that is? I got my keyword phrase in there, but still made it sound natural.
That being said, did I miss any punctuation that search engines do recognize? Also, are there any search engines that consider all punctuation?
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