Should you include both singulars and plurals in your keyword selection process? The quick answer is yes. It would be ideal to say that your pages are optimized for both the singular and the plural forms of certain keywords, assuming your visitors are using both, but it can get confusing. Which should you use in any given circumstance? Where on the page should you put them? What about the keyword meta tag? Most search engines do treat singulars and plurals differently, so these are good questions to ask.

The important thing is to understand which one your customers are using or will use and to remember that, by mathematical necessity, only one can have prominence. Only one can go first in the title, for instance. So, it’s not as simple as killing two birds with one stone or covering both bases, because it is actually impossible to optimize for two terms equally. Now ask yourself if this is really what you want. Is a near fifty percent split on the same page for two popular keywords really desirable?

Attempting to cast a wider net is never desirable with a new site. If ten people a month search for “widgets” and ten more people a month search for “widget” and you optimize a page for both, do you then have a shot at all twenty? Perhaps, if there is very little competition for those words, but it is more likely that you have simply diluted your chances for both. You have cut your chances in half for each, and what’s worse you can’t take those halves and add them together because half of a losing position is still a losing position. Search engine results are listed in order of relevance. Google has only one first page. Exact matching is somewhat important. So, better to use one stone for each bird.

The ideal solution then is to use two pages, optimizing one page for the singular and one page for the plural, taking care not to duplicate content of course. If this is not possible for your particular situation, then you will have to choose one, and decide which one deserves prominence and how much prominence. Don’t forget that secondary keywords, derivatives of your root words, and related words, should be liberally sprinkled around the page in the less prominent positions: singulars, plurals, nouns, adjectives, verbs, synonyms, even antonyms.

Search engines have evolved in recent years to include semantically related keywords in their algorithms. Primary keywords in association with secondary or related keywords rank better than primary keywords alone. Because of this, it is possible to “over-optimize” a page by focusing too much on one keyword or phrase. Search engines use “latent semantic indexing” to examine clusters of related keywords in an attempt to rank pages more accurately and return the most useful results. So, include a good mix of secondary and related words in your page content, including singulars and plurals.

Keyword meta tags are different, however. Search engines have mostly abandoned this tag in favor of those related keywords that exist on the page proper. Not a bad idea. Hopefully you have enough information on the page to make the meta tag irrelevant. Most people agree that these meta tags are not very important, but that it doesn’t hurt to keep in the habit of using them. You can never know to what extent they are being used or will be used in the future. Do not repeat keywords in your meta tags unnecessarily. Relevance is more important here than number or density.

It makes sense to me that search engines would prefer to find secondary or related keywords in the content of the page rather than in the meta tag. Latent semantic indexing gives search engines the ability to group “Babe Ruth” and “baseball bat” together for the purposes of ranking. It does this by examining supporting keywords on your page and from other pages in the same category and by building a secondary index of these related keywords. It doesn’t need a meta tag embedded in the code to do this.

The importance and the extent to which search engines use latent semantic indexing is still somewhat of a mystery, but the fact that it exists can be demonstrated by using a tilde before any search term in your Google search bar (~keyword). You will see that searching for “~design” returns and highlights related terms like “designer,” “designed,” “designing,” even “architecture” and “construction.” There are plenty of instances where this doesn’t quite show up so well, and when it does it is not always on target: The #1 position for “~scoreboard” in Google search is held by a page that does not have the word “scoreboard” anywhere on the page or anywhere on the site. It is held by a page optimized for the word “results.” Google understands that “results” can be semantically related to “score” and “scoreboard” and so returns the highest ranking related term it can find. The page actually has nothing at all to do with sports or scoreboards (results.org is a political organization), but the point is that Google does use some form of secondary indexing of related terms, with or without the tilde. A search for “widget” returns “widgets” in the #1 position. Most search engines also now include links to “related searches” right in their results pages.

Let me repeat: use both singular and plural forms of your keywords and related keywords liberally throughout the page and decide which one should have the prominent positions (do not try to split the prominent positions equally). You will get credit for your secondary keywords, by themselves and as support for your primary keywords. Repeat them often on your page, but for meta tags it is not necessary to include all forms or to repeat them because it’s little help, and search engines can parse these terms for whatever they’re worth: “scoreboards” already includes “scoreboard” within it and therefore using both is redundant. You will get equal credit for each. The same holds true for phrases which include other terms or phrases within them. Example: wood, wood stove, wood stove cleaners. The first two are redundant because they are contained within the third. Only the third one is necessary. “Wood stove cleaners” covers “wood”, “stove”, “wood stove,” and “wood stove cleaner” and “wood stove cleaners” all in one three word phrase. That’s five search terms in one which covers a lot of area. It is not necessary to keep repeating words in your meta tags. Key phrases are slightly different than keywords, as when you decide to include “wood stove pipes” in the example above, but you do NOT get a keyword density score (for good or bad) from your meta tag. It is doubtful that you will get much of a score at all, except where page content is missing or terribly light. And then not much. Keyword tags are not meant for people (they are meant for search engines) and are not considered content. The practice of stuffing these tags with irrelevant (or otherwise missing) keywords made these tags untrustworthy.

In conclusion, Google certainly does treat singulars and plurals differently, but it also considers them semantically related. This is why a search on either phrase returns mixed results. Google purportedly uses over 200 criteria for ranking pages and “exact matching” is just one of those things. Optimizing a page for the singular does not mean it will place higher in the SERPS than a page that was optimized for the plural when there are so many other factors for Google to consider. But it’s all about context and relevancy (and semantics). So, treat each case separately, give one prominence over the other rather than trying to use both equally, don’t repeat words unnecessarily in your meta tags, and then cross one more thing off your list of two hundred things to consider. :))

Not much: an “indexed” page is a page that has been crawled by a search engine spider and filed away in that search engine’s index for later use (note the italics), and a “cached” page is one that might actually show up in search results.

Apparently, getting your submitted pages listed in the SERPs is a multi-step process. First, the spiders need to access your home page and crawl whatever links it finds there. If they crawl, when they crawl, and how deep they crawl, depends on a number of factors, but let’s assume you have an easily accessible site rich with content and that the spiders have crawled every page. Congratulations! The next step is for them to decide whether or not to put the information they find into their index. Now assume they like your content well enough and decide to index all of it. Great! At this point, you can say that your pages have been indexed.

So what? Big deal. By this I mean it’s good to be indexed, but it’s not enough because this part of the index is not offered to the general search public. That is, your pages have not been cached, but all of the textual information from your pages (urls, titles, tags, snippets) have been indexed. Of course, this textual information has been cataloged, categorized, filed (indexed!) based on the keywords you chose when you built your pages and on the relative focus and interaction of those keywords on those pages, and it has been ranked accordingly, but this part of the index is not meant for the SERPs and is not accessible to surfers. This is web page purgatory. La-la land. The Google “sandbox”. It’s a way station for lonely, unused web content. A word bank from which search engines can withdraw money. Okay, no more metaphors. The point is that the search engines will not offer this content to web surfers at this stage. Google may tell you, “We have just indexed your pages!” Great, but they will NOT show up in search engine results. They may eventually arrive, but not yet.

The last step in the process comes when the search engines decide that your information (which they have already indexed and so have access to) might actually be of use to someone. When that happens, they will take a “snapshot” of the page (save or download it) and store the file away in their index of cached web pages. This is a completely different index, or more accurately, a subset of the original index, but it is safe to say that these cached pages qualify for inclusion in the SERPs, and now your potential customers may be able to find you. The search engine gods have gone one step beyond indexing your content and have now indexed the actual pages, which they will present to web surfers in their full and complete glory. It’s really just a matter of semantics. Your content has been indexed the whole time, but that doesn’t guarantee inclusion in the SERPs. Only further indexing (caching) will do that.

So, a search engine could have all 1,000 of your pages “indexed” but only 50 or so “cached.” This explains the strange numbers you get when you do a site search (site:yourdomain.com) and notice that the number at the top differs, often drastically, from the actual results on the page. This is to be expected because there may be several pages on your site which the spiders have crawled and indexed, but which the search engines did not find meaningful or useful enough to cache. You may even agree with them. A “thank you for ordering” page may get indexed (spiders are not overly picky eaters), but it probably shouldn’t get cached and it probably won’t. But the search engines figure (or were told to figure) that this page may become useful someday and so keep it in the index uncached. They will likely revisit the page on subsequent crawls to see if any changes have been made and to reevaluate the situation.

Sometimes a search engine will just stubbornly refuse to cache a page in their index which you know for a fact is very useful and which you know your customers would just love

SEO is not a one time event but a continuous process. Your initial attempt at search engine optimization for your website will almost certainly not be your last. Most site owners will tell you that there is always room for improvement. Search position and page rank are not static but are constantly changing and fluid. Trends change, industries change, markets change, search engine algorithms change, and website owners who neglect to maintain and periodically “refresh” their site after it is built and established run the risk of becoming irrelevant.

Competitors are forever attempting in several ways to outdo one another for placement in the SERPs, and an increase in page rank for one of your competitor’s pages unfortunately means a relative decrease for your own. This happens constantly as competitors come and go and work out their own SEO issues. Because of this, it is inevitable that your search position will degrade over time.

It is important to keep providing fresh content and to periodically update that content. This could be as simple as providing new offers, coupons and banner ads and tweaking your site’s titles and tags, or as much as adding whole new pages of indexable content. Search engines love finding new links to crawl and comparing the pages they find with the content they already have. Again, almost any content on the web will become stale over time without frequent updates.

Constant monitoring and maintenance of your position on the web is therefore a must, but what exactly should you be thinking about when the time soon comes to address these issues? Here are just a few considerations:

SEO Reports – Careful monitoring and analysis of your current position is important. Weekly reports containing search results by keyword or by search engine can tell you how visible your site is to the search engines and to your customers. They can also show you how that visibility fluctuates over time and give you valuable information you can use to stay on top of your competitors.

Traffic Reports – It will do you no good to place well in the SERPs for a keyword or phrase no one uses. It is important that the keywords you do place well for actually bring traffic to your site. Most traffic monitoring software can tell you the keywords your visitors are using to find you, and used in conjunction with SEO reporting software it is possible (after a certain amount of trial and error) to zero in on the keywords that give you the best placement and bring you the most traffic.

Competitive Analysis – If your competitors consistently outrank you for your most important keywords, then it is important for you to understand why and to remedy the situation. See what primary and secondary keywords your competitors are using and how they are implemented. Analyze their content and compare it to your own. Check other ranking factors as compared to your own, especially backlinks (a.k.a. inbound links). Use a backlink checker such as the one found here <http://www.iwebtool.com/backlink_checker> to discover who is linking to your competitors. You might even try getting a link for yourself from these same sites. However you obtain backlinks remember that this is the single most important factor contributing to your site’s page rank and position in the SERPs.

Navigation and site structure – Make sure your navigation menu is spiderable and that your anchor text includes the primary keywords contained in the target page. Validate your code. Messy, illogical, or poorly structured code can make it harder for search engines to crawl your site. Properly naming (or renaming) files and folders can also have a huge impact on a page’s rank because this will show up in the page’s url. Most search engines give a lot of credit to a page which contains keywords in the url because it is a very good indication of what the page is really about. “Page rank passing” is another consideration regarding site structure. Web pages share their page rank status with the pages they link to. Every link from one page to another is a “vote” for that other page. Proper internal linking structure will ensure that page rank is evenly distributed throughout your site and directed at the pages you feel are most important.

These things all take time and at the risk of sounding redundant, SEO is an ongoing process. Many SEO experts claim that the age of a site contributes to page rank. This is not technically true. The age of a site does not determine page rank, but it is a necessary correllary to page rank because site owners who have addressed all of these issues and have built and established a well-structured, well-linked site will undoubtedly have to spend many months or more doing so. These things take time. Not just the time it takes to edit a page or add a new page, but also the time it takes for those changes to get crawled, indexed, and cached. Google warns that it may take 4-6 weeks for a page edit to show up in the SERPs (whether it’s a single word on one page or several words on several pages). In my experience, you can take them at their word on that.