Singular vs. Plural If I have a website with "purple dogs" as a keyword appearing a lot, and someone types "purple dog" as their search in google. Will I still get pulled? Does google read singluar and plural words the same?
I perfer to always use plural, you do not need to optimise for both because if the page is optimized correctly then you can achieve both. Example: check both of these searches w3c validation service w3c validation services as you can see my site onlinemarketingadvisors.com has achieved both.
I concur with you banless, and to go a step further, if you optimize for red shoes, you will already be well positioned for red shoe. And, with Google and others working in word stemming, I believe it's better to go with the plural, for example female celebrities, not female celebrity
google understand plural and I don't think so that it matters much unless the phrase has special meaning for singular or plural. But ya for common words like rat/rats or tree/trees, you will get different results. For purple dogs, plural is fine. but you can use some backlinks for "purple dog"
Other SE's dont recognise both as the same, so... I agree though, most of the time I am shooting for the plural.
Yep, it's supposed to be the way banless and wrmineo have said..But, I rank #1 for "mykeyword forums" and no where for "mykeyword forum"...in google that is. Yahoo and MSN seem to be fine with it.
I always go for plural, maybe because in the most cases plural word/phrase contains singular word as well.
I had the same advice on another forum and plumped for the plural. The crazy thing is that I am optimising for several keywords in the plural and the singular versions are doing better. Go figure?
I think choosing plural or singular more or less depends upon which will get you higher in SERPs, which is searched for more often and which ends up with more conversions. Most people while searching use plural search terms because they hope to receive a list of results and not a single site.
I posed this question not too long ago. I've found that it hasn't mattered all that much whether my keywords are singular or plural. I've referenced both versions within the body of my website, and I use the plural for my anchor text. I'm doing just fine in my opinion.
I think you have to make it singular. lets position yourself as a surfer searching about the keyword you use
In my experience it depends on the site. For retail site using the plural is better because I often see more people search for it inside sentances such as "where can I buy purple dogs?" If you are producing an info site the singular seems to be searched for more as in "purple dog care guide".
I stand corrected. I did a singular search for a keyword phrase that I'm ranked highly in. I rank in positions 1-20 on the top three servers for the plural version, but only in the top 20 on MSN for the singular version. So I guess MSN is more forgiving than Yahoo/Google.