Do quotation marks in content effect SERPs?

[stephenfishman]

Some of my art object products have words and phrases  engraved on them. The words  relate to the images on the product. In the product descriptions, I have been putting quotes around the entire list. Would I get better long tail results if I didn't use the quotation marks?   In other words, do the quotes make everything between them an exact match phrase?

For example:
Current product description: 
The worlds around the edge of the lazy susan read, "Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest."

Thank you for helping with this, all comments on how to present this kind of content are welcomed-

Stephen

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[TomVolpe]

Hi there,

You’re fine to have your product description quoting the text around the side of the product, but if you were to change it to something like this without quotes:

The words around the edge of the lazy susan read: Explore nature. Dream big. Take time to smell the flowers. Enjoy the changing seasons. Seize the day. Relish the night. Live life to the fullest.

…that would have the exact same SEO value as the existing description. Quotes are only counted as exact match keywords when searching in Google (and most other search engines), but don’t actually affect the way the page is seen by Google. The same way that using bold and italics to emphasise your keywords would not directly influence rank (but make your content more easily digestible, earning it more links and indirectly affecting rank), your quotes are also used to enhance human readability – but either would be fine.

Take a real world example: I pulled a page from my history which included a quote, “favor composition over inheritance” - (http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/65179/where-does-this-concept-of-favor-composition-over-inheritance-come-from)

Take a look at the screenshot I took below (from an unclean browser, sorry) – or you can run a search yourself – and we still see Wikipedia at the top, with its DA 100 (and no quotes); we see stackoverflow rising above stackexchange, with a higher DA; one result has more links than the stackexchange page, one has fewer. But they still perform better.

The stackexchange page with 5 counts of “favor composition over inheritance" (with quotes) is still outranked by the others.

• The 3^rd result uses the keyword 6 times, twice in quotes.
• The 2^nd result uses the keyword once without quotes.
• The 1^st Wikipedia result uses the term once without quotes and still ranks #1 due to its other (better) metrics.

There are a number of factors which could affect the position of these pages for this keyword, such as anchor text for links to those pages, partial match keywords in the text and other ranking factors which I did not look into – but hopefully it will give you a real example of quotation marks not directly affecting the value of a keyword in Google’s eyes.

Write the descriptions the way you that sounds best to you – and optimise them for human readability, as quotes versus no quotes doesn’t make much of a difference.

Hope that helps,

Tom

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