Is there a way to morph strange sounding keywords

[SozzledBoot]

A lot of pure gold keyword phrases read like a foreign language:

IE (I made this phrase up for discussion purposes), "acne treat and what is"

What the heck does that mean???!!!

Now for SEO purposes, you can use them as given (researched).

But in terms of visitor satisfaction and readability, the phrase is meaningless, confusing, spammy, and maybe even a complete turn-off.

Is there a way to take a keyword phrase like that and morph it into a user friendly phrase while still retaining its SEO relevance, traffic, competition and commerciality value?

Can't really use it in a permalink (page or post title that converts to a permalink), or anchor text. But maybe you can use it in the meta keywords element and the hyperlink title attribute.

Still I wonder if something else can be done, especially in terms of putting the phrase inside the body of text in a page or post.

This would be a great idea for a software tool.

[KirkMcD]

Are you sure you aren't looking at an old keyword list pulled from Overture? They would put their keyword phrases in alphabetical order, so they made no sense sometimes.
It's easier and cheaper to just get a new more relevant list, than to try and create a tool to "fix" them.

[Tina Golden]

I generally just skip the really odd ones or the misspelled keywords - I just can't bring myself to put my name to a deliberate misspelling.

With many, though, you can add some punctuation to make it make sense. For example, something like "roofing Massachusetts"... I've seen people sprinkle the phrase as is and it sounds like a dufus wrote the piece.

Instead, you can do things like this:

When it comes to roofing, Massachusetts homeowners find...

Or

There are many factors to consider when considering new roofing. Massachusetts residents, for example, must contend with a lot of snow and ice on their roofs.

[wannabewarrior]

Tina -- I had thought about that before when I ran across these kinds of phrases, but I thought that adding the puncutation might make the search engine see the punctuated phrase (altered to make the copy more readable) as different from the strange sounding keyword that was being targeted.

So, just to confirm -- is it true that adding punctuation in a keyword phrase would have no effect? If so, that's really helpful info.

[SozzledBoot]

Originally Posted by KirkMcD

Are you sure you aren't looking at an old keyword list pulled from Overture? They would put their keyword phrases in alphabetical order, so they made no sense sometimes.
It's easier and cheaper to just get a new more relevant list, than to try and create a tool to "fix" them.

I use Market Samurai to generate most of my keyword lists. I set the Phrase-to-Broad ratio at 15%.

I agree that creating a tool to "fix" the keywords would be hard...ergo, a goldmine for any keyword tool software developer who can do it.

[SozzledBoot]

Great. Idea Tina.

[guitarpaul]

I'd test putting both the "gibberish" version and the real version on the page. Something like Keyword1 | Keyword 2