Google doesn’t take into account the order of the words that you type into the search box – unless you tell it to by using quotation marks. Now, psychologists from Boston, USA, have found that humans don’t either.

It turns out that in familiar word pairs, such as “Internet marketing” if the words are the wrong way round, as in “marketing Internet”, we read them the way we expect them to be. So, you would read “management time” as “time management” or “networking social” as “social networking”.

Of course, you’d probably not be noticing any such thing in the words I’d just given you because you have been “primed” into seeing the effect. But for anyone who produces web sites it means you can have web pages that contain words in the “wrong” order that appear in the right order for humans. The benefit for anyone trying to gain higher search engine rankings is that the order of the words matters only a little.

So, for instance, you could write some text that ended one sentence with the word “marketing” and then started the next sentence with “Internet”. Humans would see “Internet marketing” as would Google. This helps because it means you don’t have to repeatedly use the same words on the page which would become boring to the reader and seem as repetitive to search engines.

In words other this new research shows us you can be more creative with your copy and your headlines, safe in the knowledge that your readers would get the real message.