What Are the Best Practices for Ranking for Synonyms?

[cyberlicious]

This topic has me entirely confused, and unsure if we should keep a website focused on one keyword group, and using synonym contextual links to rank it for other keyword  synonyms. We simply have not seen enough data or run enough tests to find our answer, and wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone has. I have seen Google rank a synonym to my search query on the first page, and is why we are confused.

Let's use an example:

We'll use "Industry" as the main keyword for our page. "Company" or "Companies" is viewed as a synonym by Google of this keyword.  When we query "Industry", "Company" and "Companies" are also found in bold.

1.) Is it best practice to also create a unique page targeting synonyms? Our thinking is that it would be best to try and target exactly what the user is looking for rather than having a synonym to their search for better conversions, but as mentioned above we feel it's best to hit exactly what they query because that's their way of thinking.  That they're looking for that exact match.

2.) Have the page "Industry", but do some link building using contextual links "Company" or "Companies" pointing back at our "Industry" page. Would this help rank our "Industry" page for "Company"  or "Companies" even though the main page is "Industry"? Just not sure we want to do this as the reasoning explained in #1.

Thanks for your help!

[KrisRoadruck]

The best bet would be to use the words semi-interchangeably on that page (don't over do it) and then just grab some links with anchor texts of the various synonyms. Single page is going to be the stronger bet.

[pointblankseo]

Vary your anchor text - A LOT. Use as many synonyms as possible. This helps with Latent Semantic Indexing; once you start telling Google a page is about these synonyms, it will start to imply other synonyms as well.