Does it make a difference if the keywords (in anchor text) are in a plural or a singular form? And if one of them ranks well does that mean that the other will too?
I think it does not matter. keywords in anchor text should be like that by which you want to promote your site.
I don't have any solid data on this, but I think that using plural will also catch the singular, as long as the singular is a subset. For example, "cool gadgets" will also match for "cool gadget", but "best analyses" won't match to "best analysis" unless the search engine has some sophisticated plural/singular matching. Jay
No unfortunately this is not the case but I wish it were! The plural is viewed by Google as a totaly seperate word than the singular. You need to optimize for both seperately if you want to rank well on each one. You can verify this by typing in the plural in a Google search and then typing in the singular and you will see totaly different results. Granted many of the same sites will appear (usualy in a slightly different order) but that's because they have optimized for both... As a generalization... plural usualy brings in more visits.