If I use multiple versions of a phrase, would it be seen as keyword spam?

Matt's answer:

CUTTS: Here’s a question from HVR at an undisclosed location. HVR says, “I noticed that, for example, ‘Texas widget’ and ‘widget Texas’ return different results. I think the gist is the same but the results were different. I’d like to include both terms or phrases on my page but wouldn’t that be considered keyword spamming?” Well, it’s true. Google doesn’t consider Britney Spears and Spears Britney to be the same thing. So there’s proximity and then anti-proximity. And my short answer is, we wouldn’t automatically consider it, you know, stuffing if you had widget Texas and Texas widget. But what I would pay attention to is that you do it in a natural sort of way. If you’re doing it all at the bottom and you’re repeating all the different combinations of ways to combine these phrases, that’s probably not going to be ideal. It’s also, probably, not worth spending a ton of time targeting all the different permutations of a phrase because users don’t really type all of those permutations. If 99% of people say, “plumber San Francisco,” it doesn’t make a ton of sense to, you know, say, “plumber San Francisco CA,” “CA San Francisco plumber,” “CA plumber San Francisco,” and you just get dizzy and sit down after awhile. So you can–especially if it’s a small number of phrases–you can pay attention to doing that, but it wouldn’t be a major factor. I wouldn’t spend a ton of time on doing that if it were me.

by Matt Cutts - Google's Head of Search Quality Team

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