Search term frequency

[sfowler]

This may be a real dumb question, but it is bothering me: Our company sells flue gas analysers, so I try to get the word in as often as possible on the website, which I am working on again now. To this purpose I took a text I had used before about flue gas analysers, about 35 pages, and used that. To my horror, the term "flue gas analyser" does not turn up once, it is all "flue gas analysers" when you are talking about the things. Anyone doing a search will stick with the singular (well I do anyway!). Does this mean I have to rewrite it and mangle the grammar to get found?

[Rajeev Ranjan Singh]

Just try to incorporate all combination of word in your site.

[Mel]

Some search engines (Google for example) will stem the word and recognize the plural for for singular searches but the rankings will not be as good as if the singular term was used.

A bit of ingenuity in your copywriting should do the trick, snabling you to use both the singular and plural, but stressing the one which research (not guesses) shows is the more prevalent in searches.

[sfowler]

Thanks, I'm going to work on it and see what happens.
I will also add plenty of ALT text to the pictures containing spelling mistakes to try and catch the semi-literate.

[jestep]

You could try using bold paragraph headers or something using the singular. Also make sure you have links coming into your site with the actual word that you are targeting in the anchor text.

[sfowler]

I'ver run through it and got a mixture of singular and plural, Brit and American now. I have links going out on all the target words to another page and a link coming in on one of the target words. I will get the others sorted at the weekend and just wait and see.

[crashingflwrgrl]

I had kinda the same problem with "taillights" and "tail lights".

I found that incorporating both spellings did the trick. But I still focused on the spelling that had the most searches.

[sfowler]

I'm working on that one by incorporating massive amounts of alternative text at the moment. Search terms change from month to month and it is difficult to get a feel for what people type incorrectly. The search term frequency counters only really work in English as well, unless anyone knows a good link for search terms in German and Polish.