So What is Stemming and How Can it Improve My Website Ranking

Amongst other strategies, "stemming" is another important technique for placing keywords. Positioning Meta tags and keywords into web pages for better ranking should not be confused with spamming. Whatever you do, avoid spamming and keyword stuffing.

Search Engines have mechanisms that can spot spamming and as a result ignore such web pages. The key is to insert just 'enough' keywords into the web page so as to make the content relevant. Keywords have to be consistent with the entire content of the web page. In other words, do not insert non relevant keywords just for the sake of improving page rankings. Many webmasters believe that adding more graphics to a web page would make it more attractive. This is a misconception.

A web page should be rich with HTML text rather than graphics. This makes the site more relevant as Search Engines can easily scan text. Search engines often look for variants of words from a stem and this is referred to as "stemming". Thus 'play' can also lead to a search for 'plays' or 'playing' or 'players'.

Similarly singular and plural forms of words and case can lead to different results for some search engines. Some advisers suggest that Capitalization is a better bet in choosing keywords. However, the wiser counsel is that these variants do not make that great a difference and one should prefer lowercase.

Most searches are made in lowercase. Moreover, many search engines are not case-sensitive. You may like to know what are the most popular search words and strings, so that you could choose top keywords related to your own site. Place your subject term in Overture's free Search Term Suggestion Tool. The result will be a list of all search terms related to the word you inserted that were most popular at Overture.

The list is in the order of popularity. Thus you know what most people are looking for. Wordtracker has a fee-based service that lets you do the same based on Meta search engines such as Dogpile and Meta Crawler. Supplement this effort through the Related Searches feature that is seen in many search engines. Sites such as AltaVista, Yahoo, HotBot and others have this feature. Place your subject or one of the target keywords in the search string on these.

From the results page go to the section: "Others searched for" or "Related searches" that is available on many search engines and you will find the other related terms listed there.

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