Keywords/phrases syntax question

Hey guys, quick question. How much does keywords/syntax influence SERP? i.e syntax 1: cheap keyword vs syntax 2: keyword cheap? I don't quite know everything about G's algo yet so aside from human's influence in preferring one syntax over another, does anyone know if G's algo make a big deal out of the syntax?

Having the exact term on a page that a person is searching for will give that page a higher chance of being considered relevant than a page that contains the words in a different order. However, that doesn't mean that having the words in a different order doesn't count, it does. To what degree having the exact term is better than having the term's words out of order is impossible to quantify unless you're on the Google search team.

Bottom line is, if you're trying to rank for a multi-word search term then put it in the correct order in your contents.

If there are few other pages that Google thinks are relevant to a search, it will pick pages that have the terms but in a different order. Also, if it has other metrics it thinks makes a page without that term more relevant, it will show them. That's why pages can rank for search terms that don't even appear anywhere on the page.

Also, Google takes into account root words and synonyms.

So someone might search for "biggest house in the world" and Google might show a page that's titled "largest house in the world" because biggest and largest mean the same in that context.

A search for "driving is fun" could return a page that has "that scenic drive is fun" because when stemming the words, "driving" and "drive" both stem to "drive"

It definitely makes a difference. Try searching for both terms and you will get different results. You also want to rank for the correct term that people will search for, otherwise your site will not convert and will get a high bounce rate. Also one search term might also get a lot less traffic. I would use the keyword tool inside adwords to find what the exact match search results are.

Both. Exact keyword match is more important but contextual relevance is also not ignored, as blackhatsoda has already pointed out. But if you have long tail phrases that do not make grammatical sense, you must not use it. Quality of content has become more important nowadays. Example: "laundry services Oxford how many" (hypothetical) may be an exact keyword phrase but it does not make grammatical sense and you'd be better off by using contextually relevant, grammatically correct variations of the same while optimizing.