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by jesse dacosta
9/12/2008 3:50:00 AM
Hi everybody! It's been a while since my last post, which also happened to be my first and only post. But I'm back with a vengeance today. I want to tackle a question that clients often ask me so that I can clear this issue up for beloved readers, writers and clients. The question: How do search engines treat the singular and plural versions of a keyword or keyword phrase? Often clients will come to me and say, "We are in the process of optimizing our website. Does it make a difference whether or not we choose to optimize for the singular version or the plural version of the keyword or phrase? Do the search engines treat them the same way, so that optimizing for one version also means you are optimizing for the other, or do they treat them differently?”
Most if not all search engines do differentiate between singular and plural versions of a keyword or phrase. This includes Google, the dominant search engine. It's not crazy to assume that if you optimize for the plural version you would also be optimizing for the singular version—but they are in fact treated differently by the search engines. That’s not to say that if you just optimize for the singular version you won’t rank for the plural if you haven’t optimized for the plural; you certainly can and it happens frequently. The search engines use stemming when they return their results, which means that they will look for alternate forms of the word being searched. So, for example, if you optimize a page for “dog fence,” you’d also be targeting “dog fences”; and if someone searches for “dog fence,” it will also match “dog fences.”
Here’s something interesting. It is usually the exact term that someone searched that is given preference when the engines return their results. So if you optimize your page for “dog fence” and someone searches for “dog fences,” you may appear in the results for the plural form, but you may find that you have a different ranking for the plural form than you do for the singular form for which you optimized. I have seen many instances where a site would rank on the first page for the singular form but would be somewhere on the third page for the plural. Other factors include the competition for each version, the pages that have been optimized for each version, and how well they have each been optimized.
If both versions of a phrase are highly searched and both convert well, I recommend optimizing for both (on the same page, on separate pages, both work). If the popularity is skewed toward one version over the other (which can be uncovered with some quick keyword research), I would recommend optimizing for the more highly searched version to start. If one version is not being searched very much, and the competition for that keyword is minimal, chances are you will rank well for that keyword just by optimizing for the other version. From my understanding and experience, in most cases, the plural forms seem to be more searched than the singular, especially for e-commerce sites. However, this also depends on the type of product for sale.
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Tags: seo, keywords, keyword research, singular vs plural
For Clients | Writing
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