ATOMIC DESIGN

Many of our SEO clients often ask us if Google and other SEs differentiate between singular and plural versions of keywords in search engine results. They also wonder if they target a singular keyword would their page show up for plural keyword searches as well.

To answer the questions, most major search engines (Google, Yahoo!) do consider the plural keyword to be different from the singular keyword. If you want to check a specific search engine type in the singular and plural version of the keyword in a search bar and see if the results produced are the same or different.

For example, Google uses stemming technology to return search results. Stemming finds alternate forms of a word, such as singular or plural variations. So if someone searches for “trade show model”, it will also match “trade show models” and “trade show modeling”. This means that if you create a page targeting the word “trade show model”, you’d also be targeting the word “trade show models.” However, you’ll still find that generally it is the exact term someone sought that gets preference. In other words, if you didn’t use the word “trade show model” but instead “trade show models”, you might come up in the listings but have a different rankings that you have for the singular form.

If both the singular and the plural form of a phrase get a lot of conversions and targeted traffic to your site, we usually recommend optimizing for both. Take for example our www.TradeShowModels.net website, we’ve optimized it to show up #1 in Google both for singular “Trade Show Model” and plural “Trade Show Models” phrases because these are the keywords that get the most conversions.

If you want more information about Google search visit their Web Search Help Center.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.