There are several ways to approach using the singular form versus the plural form of your keyword phrase in your webpage title that the search engines see. Understanding the reasoning behind each of these theories will enable you to decide what approach is best for your situation and increase your knowledge of on page SEO for your online marketing strategies.
I’ll state this right up front; there is some disagreement among online marketing SEO experts on how to optimize a web page using a keyword phrase in its singular form separate from its plural form versus using both the singular and the plural form.
A lot of hardcore online marketing SEO people will tell you that the title and the ‘tag’ are the two most defining elements that tell a search engine what a particular webpage is all about. Therefore, these should both be the exact keyword phrase only with no other words added. I normally use this theory on most of my web pages.
To understand the different lines of thought regarding online marketing SEO when it comes to the singular form versus the plural form let’s focus on looking at the ‘title’ of the webpage as the search engines see it. This is the title defined in the source code which you’ll see at the very top with the word ‘title’ between ‘<‘ and ‘>’ and then what should be a keyword phrase followed by ‘/title’ again between the mathematical symbols ‘<‘ and ‘>.’
It can be seen at the very top right of your browser bar.
Now you might feel frustrated that I am not giving you a concrete answer on exactly what to do but there is normally a lot of grey area and disagreement regarding the best online marketing SEO practices. If you have a better understanding you can make an intelligent choice and be confident that choice was made by conscious reasoning. This understanding will help remove confusion and doubt which can gnaw at you and slow you down as you continue to work.
Let me present to you some examples to better clarify this online marketing SEO technique. For these examples I will use the keyword phrases ‘Orlando Vacation’ and ‘Orlando Vacations.’
Again let me remind you that for online marketing SEO purposes the title for the search engines is not the headline of your blog post are your article but the one known as the ‘Title Tag.’ Now the idea here is that you want to very clearly state to the search engines what this webpage is about so in my opinion this ‘title’ would be focused on only one of the keyword phrases and would be just that keyword phrase as in:
Orlando Vacation
or
Orlando Vacations
You could have a separate page on your website for each one but to follow good online marketing SEO procedure you want well written, different, valuable content on each page even though they are focused on the same subject.
There are some online marketing SEO experts that will tell you to use both the singular and the plural in the title in this type of format:
Orlando Vacations: Planning Your Orlando Vacation
Because I personally feel no one really notices the words that are the title way at the top of the browser bar and I do not want the word ‘Planning’ to confuse the search engines as to the exact focus of this webpage; if I were to decide to use both the singular and the plural I would have:
Orlando Vacation, Orlando Vacations
Another online marketing SEO tip is this: You can open two separate browser windows and search for your singular keyword phrase in one window and in the other window the plural form. Then place them side by side to see how different the first and second pages of the two search results are.
This will show you how different the singular is viewed versus the plural. HOWEVER! You won’t know all of the many other online marketing SEO factors regarding those pages that got them ranking high.
While I have not specifically told you what to do, I have only stated what I would do in this situation, I have explained some of the valid reasoning behind how to consider working with singular and plural keywords in the title that the search engines read.
As you continue learning more about online marketing SEO you’ll understand that this is just one factor among many when it comes to search engine optimization of a webpage but every little bit of SEO you do adds up!