SEO Warrior

Keywords and Language

A keyword can be any word, found anywhere on your site! This includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. A keyword can also be a collection of words or a phrase. When creating your keywords, you can use keyword modifiers to create different keyword combinations.

The Importance of Word Stemming

Word stemming refers to the concept of various word derivations from their basic (root) stems. This concept is important, as using it can help in perceived page relevance. Using multiple-word variations can assist you in attaining additional targeted traffic. To quote Wikipedia:

Stemming is the process for reducing inflected (or sometimes derived) words to their stem, base or root form—generally a written word form. The stem need not be identical to the morphological root of the word; it is usually sufficient that related words map to the same stem, even if this stem is not in itself a valid root. The algorithm has been a long-standing problem in computer science; the first paper on the subject was published in 1968. The process of stemming, often called conflation, is useful in search engines for query expansion or indexing and other natural language processing problems.

Let’s look at an example of keyword stemming. When searching for the four-word phrase social network automate tweet, I got the SERP fragment shown in Figure 11-5. If you look closely, it should be clear how Google relates the word stem and its derivative.

Google sees the connection between the search term network ...