With quotes
set to 'No', each term will be sent to the search engine as it
is. E.g. 'quiz shows online' is sent as
and if quotes
already exist then the term is sent as
If you want
to submit every term as a phrase (with quotes around each one),
then change use quotes to 'Yes'.
Please bear in mind that Wordtracker defaults to 'exact match searching'.
Exact match searching means that a search engine searches for only those sites which
use the keyword exactly as typed in by the user. e.g.
Notice how the keywords are inside quotes.
Partial match search means that a search
engine also searches for sites which contain the individual words of the keyword but not
necessarily occurring together or in the order typed in by the user. e.g.
You can see that the keywords are not inside quotes.
A common question we get is:
Most people don't know about wrapping the keywords in quotes to search on the exact phrase.
Also, in most search engines you need to go out of your way to use any advanced search options
such as exact phrasing - and since it's more work, far fewer people will do it - let alone even
understand it. So why is this the default? Shouldn't you turn the quotes off?
This is a common misconception. Whether a user enters a term inside quotes or not is actually
irrelevant. The only time we need to know about the users is when we want to know how many times
they search for a particular keyword or keyphrase.
But you aren't competing against users for top placement, you are competing with other web
sites that are already indexed. This is the all important difference.
To give an example, if you are trying to rank highly on 'chicago real estate', you are not competing
with web sites that have incorporated 'partial match searching' into their pages:
e.g. meta name="keywords" content="chicago, florida, real, estate"
you are competing with web sites that have incorporated 'exact match searching' into their pages:
e.g. meta name="keywords" content="chicago real estate, florida real estate"
Notice the placement of the commas in the examples above. In partial match searching, there is a
comma after each word. In the exact match example, the comma comes after each keyword phrase.
If a user requests 'florida real estate', search engines will return pages indexed by exact matches (pages with chicago real
estate, florida real estate) above pages indexed by partial matches (pages with chicago, florida, real, estate).
Here's another example. If a user enters 'quiz shows online', search engines will usually look for
pages that have been indexed with 'quiz shows online, quiz shows, quiz shows today ...' above those with
'quiz, shows, online, today'.
This is why we default to using quotes (exact match searching) when
querying the engines for competing web pages. It gives a truer representation
of your competition.
