Michael Gray - Graywolf's SEO Blog

How to Add Singular and Plural Keywords to Your Page Titles

Posted: 01 Nov 2010 07:54 AM PDT

This post is a short response to a question I received via email last week. The question was how to do deal with singular and plural versions of a keyword in that page title.

The slightly spammy way that many people deal with the problem is to create two single pages, one for the single and one for the plural version. While this solves the keyword targeting problem, it often creates duplicate or at least conceptually duplicate content. If you don’t understand the difference between technically different and conceptually different be sure to read this classic post from Sugarrae When Unique Content is Not Unique.

However back to the problem of singular and plural keywords in the title: if you can relax your English and grammar a little bit, it’s a problem that’s easily solved. Let’s say you wanted to target two phrases [ipod review] and [ipod reviews]. Here’s how I would do it:

Reviews: Ipod Review – Mike’s Gadget Website

Here’s another example for [kitchen aid mixer] and [kitchen aid mixers] …

Mixers: Kitchen Aid Mixer – Mike’s Cooking Website

So basically what we’re doing is bracketing the common term between the singular and plural versions of the keyword. In addition to getting the singular and plural terms next to each other it puts them at the front of the title, where they are given the most weight. Once you’ve got both keywords in title you want to make sure you have the singular and plural versions in the body of the content. One of the tools I use to make sure I am getting both versions in the text is Scribe SEO (see my Scribe SEO review). While I’m not a fan of KWD density as a leading metric, you want make sure it’s there and you aren’t emphasizing the wrong words. Scribe gives you the results right in WordPress post screen (see below). If you’re interested, use the Scribe SEO Coupon Code [stepup] between now and November 5th and you will automatically be upgraded to the next level for free.

Let’s review how to use singular and plural keywords in a single page title:

Identify the singular and plural terms
Bracket the common term with the singular and plural version in the beginning of the title for maximum benefit
Make sure you have both the singular and plural versions in body content
Try to give them equal weight if possible

photo credit: GKS.

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