Variations and Rankings

[MartinWardPhoto]

How do search engines view wording variances?

I am trying to target Scottish Wedding Photographer but will google/bing etc be intelligent enough to see plurals, see the word Scotland instead of Scottish, photography instead of photographer?

Also with rankings, I had a secondary phrase there to which I'm ranking sort of page 2-3 at the moment (the site is circa 3 months old) but finding that I'm nowhere with the Scottish phrase, I checked 30 pages of results and show nowhere, is this due to the competition for my phrase?

My site is www.martinwardphotography.com

[94501]

I think Andy is on the right track, with the caveat that Google needs a little help in the general meaning department. So, one easy way to do that is use Moz's on-page grader for whatever term you've selected... that best describes the page and is hopefully not too difficult and has a little traffic.Just to make sure Google has enough clues as to what this page is about.

Over time, you will find that the page hopefully gives you traffic for all kinds of related terms... not just the one you graded against.  Like everyone else, I have pages with top terms that supposedly are good for no estimated traffic, yet dozens of terms contribute hundreds or thousands of visits because they're all in the same general neighborhood.

Plurals and what not don't change the general meaning which you have helped Google fully perceive without getting spammy.

[TomKing]

Hi Martin,

I wouldn't get too 'hung up' about plurals etc, they will be taken care of!

Here is what I would do;

Focus on writing and building content about your business, write articles and blog posts in almost story format describing your experiences with being a wedding photographer in Scotland - what will happen is that the keywords will take care of themselves, you will include singular and plural terms by default and you will find that you will rank for terms that you had never even though about!

Sorry if I didn't answer your question directly but what I'm trying to say is focus more on creating excellent and informative content and less about the keywords!

Good luck!

Andy