Target Plural or Singular words???
 

When considering SEO with page titles and content should you include the plural or the singular of a wrod or a mix.

If a mix which holds more importance or does it not matter?

When looking for keyword popularity through overture it brings the same results for the plural and singular of a term, but in the search result pages for the singular and plural word are different.

Any Ideas on how to decide???

Is there any keyword tracker that recognises plurals?

At the moment Im copying what the big sites in my niche target but it would be interesting to know what ppl actually search for.

P.S I'm new to the board so Hi everyone.

I usually go with whatever makes sense in a sentance - no one is ever going to say "Tammy's Big Boob" :D

I have found panty and panties are the same when it comes to search engines but as GG says, 'used panties' is the one I concentrate on as 'used panty' doesn't quite sound right...

Sue

Sorry, but that's wrong!
Search engines can differentiate between the singular and plural of a word (just look at the SERPs for "panty" and "panties" on the big engines), so you should choose which one to put more weight on.

You chose "used panties" which I think was a very good choice, because it should get more searches as "used panty" (but I didn't look that up, so can't say for sure).

While writing the copy for your web page you should always use the word which fits the sentence (as GreenGuy stated), but you should've chosen the keywords you want to optimize for before starting to write the copy ;-)

So if you want to target "used panty" you should think about phrasing the sentences you want to use so that you can write "used panty".

To the initial question:
You should optimize for the one that
a) gets the most searches or
b) has the better search/result ratio
depending on your seo skills.

If you're sure you can achieve top positions for every keyword you target, then of course you should go for option a). But if you're just a small webmaster, you should go with option b) just because that's how you'ld end with better chances to get good listings ;-)

You don't necessarily want to optimize for the most commonly searched term, as that's usually the most competetive :)

That's what I meant when writing

I just thought that that's pretty obvious because not a single webmaster who just builds galleries and free sites will ever achieve a top20 position for a keyword like "sex" ;-)
Always choose keywords which aren't searched for that often. You might get less traffic than with another keyword but your traffic will probably be of a better quality and convert better!

What if Tammy DOES have a Big Boob?
|shocking|

Most important - if the word can be used both ways, defintiely target both - and keep in mind that Overture does have a pluralism defect (new phrase I came up with) :)
Try some of the other word tools like Googles sand box in adwords to see the differences

Thanks for the extra help guys - most useful! |headbang|

Go with what makes more sense; some search engines are using stemming which reduces expression to its word stem - panty, panties = panti
Most ofter the 'The Porter Stemming Algorithm' is used, here you can check out some examples:

http://maya.cs.depaul.edu/~classes/ds575/porter.html

There is a discussion going on how much google has implemented stemming already - you will see arguments for it and against it. My advice is include the keywords but make it as attractive for the surfer as possible.

Here the Porter Stemming Algo in more detail:

http://www.tartarus.org/~martin/PorterStemmer/