Hi, I was wondering how search engines treat synonyms. I have noticed that if you search for sites related to "attorney", sites optimized both for "attoneys" and "lawyers" come up. Here is a hypothetical scenario. Say I build a site for a law firm, I only use "lawyer", not "attorney" on the site. When I build links, I only use "lawyer" in the anchor texts, not "attorney". Will this site come up for "attorney" related searches? If the content is relevant, are search engines smart enough to rank the site high despite the fact that the site doesn't have the word "attorney"? I noticed search engines are smart enough to understand "New York" is similar to "NY", "Colorado" to "CO", when you search for location specific keyword phrases. Your insights are much appreciated!
Their different.. just like plural and singular... they have different results, depends on who target/ranked the particular kw.. and NY is not a Synonyms its a acronym...
I doubt you would see that much action, if you based your inbound links with both sets of anchor text you'd see much better SERP action in my opinion. Keep your websites content human readable, don't worry about keywords, just write the content as if it wasn't going on a webpage.