What’s The Plural Of Search Engine Optimization

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 20 of May , 2008 at 6:57 am

Do plurals make any difference to keywords and your search engine optimization strategies? The short answer is, it depends on the search engine and it depends on the word in question.

The long answer, it depends on the - oh - I have already said that. The reality is, there is no long answer, just a lot of work. Search engine optimization works at optimizing a page and keywords are the focal point, even for link building.

The hard work is going through the trial and error process of determining whether or not your keywords are plural dependent or independent. Using the word ‘widget’ as an example, I undertook a search on ‘widget’; ‘widgets’; and ‘widget’s’. The results were interesting and if my SEO had widget as a keyword I would need to think carefully about my plan.

Widget was an interesting search as the number one result in Google came out as ‘widgets’ - a Yahoo! link at that - there were 96 million results. Widgets on the other hand had 108 million results with ‘widget’ in the number one position. Widget’s only had 113 million results and also had ‘widget’ in the number one position. The top position on all three was widget.yahoo first. In second position on two of three was apple.com - for the term ‘widget’ apples was in position four. The question is - did they incorporate all three versions in their search engine marketing program?

Using Yahoo! for the same searches, the results were a whopping 500 million for widget and widgets with the same sites listed for both terms. Widget’s on the other hand only had 500 thousand results with a different list of sites in the top positions. Yahoo! asked if I really meant widgets. It seems that for a term like widgets, SEO strategies could rely on the one version.

The results were mixed between Yahoo! and Google and between different words. It seems that Yahoo! seems to be less reliant on the exact spelling. If you have any doubts about plurals then your program needs to include some keyword testing using both the singular and plural version of the word.

Other oddities include hyphenated words, capitals and the ‘S’ - ‘Z’ variations in words. There can also be an interesting variation in regional and international spelling with words like color/colour and labor/labour. Your search engine optimization program and keyword research needs to take these spelling variations into account.

Category: SEO

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