Pluralization

Chris Jaeger
Sell More Weddings
(978) 283-8295

Does pluralization in search engines matter?

I say "yes, it does" and by not paying attention to this issue you can significantly hurt your overall search engine optimization strategy and search engine positioning. On the other side of the coin, using pluralization correctly can significantly help your search engine positioning.

Pluralization is basically using an "s" or not using an "s" at the end of words. Using and "es", for example. People use the words differently and as you might expect search engines like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN treat them differently.

Search engines see "minister" and "ministers" as two different words. They see the keyword phrase "wedding photographer" and "wedding photographers" differently also.

I guess that most people search using the plural form of words. Instead of searching for ONE wedding photographer in Chicago, chances are brides and grooms are searching for "wedding photographers in Chicago".

No matter what you hear, what your webmaster might way (most webmasters don't know much about search engines, anyway), I've seen the difference in positioning and rank change because of pluralization and I personally use plurizlization strategies and am getting good results.

Power Tips:

You should never optimize a page or a site for a single keyword phrase.

Every site has dozens, if not hundreds, of phrases that someone might use at a search engine when searching. The challenge, and it's hard work, is to figure out what they are and then use them to your advantage.

Be sure to use pluralized keywords in both your page copy and your page title tags.

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