How should I deal with plural, accents and others?

[jgenesto]

We are optimizing a french website. Most of the keywords we are targetting can be (and are used)in a plural form as well. We have noticed that the results for the plural and singular are not strictly the same (yet, very close).

Similarly, one of the most important keywords we use (étudiant: student) is often times spelt without the accent. Again, the results are differnt in Google.

Now, the question is: should we focus only on the "main" form (singular and with accents) and hope that search engines will always do a good job at this or should we care for all the versions, which would be quite weird, as it means we would need to have different pages for each "version" of the same word.

Also, SEOMoz doesn't deal very well with this. We get an A on the singular with accent form for a given page, and a F for that same page and keyword, but without the accent and in plural.

[loopyal]

SEOMoz is not google.

I suspect that SEOMoz is an exact match system, so it will not pick up the nuances that google does, unless they recode that. I have seen the same with a few things I tested too.

You will only get a perfect answer here from someone who has thoroughly tested it - and you have that opeion too.

My view is that you just do one of them and let google do its thing to find relevance.

You can't possibly tie up every keyword by trying to match for them all. If you do try, you will turn your site into a mess that people will look at and wonder what the heck you are trying to do. It will probably be confusing and you will undo any good work you do. Look in your analytics to see what is working for you already. Then reinforce those things. I wouldn't try to go after things that confuse other pages that already do well.

[NaHoku]

I've found pluralized versions of a word tend to be searched more than singular versions - at least according to our set in Google Keyword Tools.  I look at customer intent.  Would a customer search for thai food restaurant in oregon, or thai food restaurant(s) in oregon?  If there is a clear winner I would go after that.  I'm not absolutely certain if Google will give you a solid ranking for the singular version because it is embedded in the pluralized version.  Maybe someone can confirm.

Bonne chance(s)!

[FranckNlemba]

Hi

Matt cutts has recently suggested to avoid accent when it's possible, he also mentionned that in general search engines as google can easily deal with accent though. I think you could find additional notes by watching this video

Check this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4TKJwvTu50

[AaronWheeler]

Hey Julien! As Alan says, our On-Page tool is an exact match, so just as Google may give you different results for plurals and accents, so will our tool. I've seen plurals and accents be marginally different in SERPs, but I've also seen them be drastically different, which is why we do the exact match thing. I hope that helps explain! Perhaps we can let the user choose exact or partial sometime in the future...

[jgenesto]

So how do you suggest we optimize on keywords? Make sure we optimize all versions? That probably means creating more pages as, for example, we probably can't optimize a given page's title for both the singular and plural forms.

[AaronWheeler]

That is a tough one, but I'm no SEO expert - I work on our customer service team. I'd follow the advice of other SEOs here and see if you get more responses. It does sound like building more pages might be the route you want to take if you're not ranking under all four version of a term (singular/accent, singular/no accent, plural/accent, plural/no accent). I'm surprised that these four different queries yield such different results. If you can, I'd also check to see that it's worth spending time on these variations. Sorry I don't know more about this, but hoped this helped explain our tool!

[Litz]

This mean the page grade tool is not very helpfull for others language than english.

Ok for plurial as they are different words, but accent should not be on an exact match I believe. For the same word : "theme" or "thème" I will have a A grade then a F grade, the F grade is an error.

French people never put accent when searching on google, but the page title must have the accent for exemple. So this tool is useless for us. All my well ranking pages got a F grades...

Something you should care about.

[ChiarynMiranda]

Hey Thibaud,

Thanks for writing in and sorry that you are having some trouble with your on-page reports. I have created a feature request for removing the exact match requirement for accented letters in the on-page reports so that our product team can look into making this change to our tools. Please feel free to add your vote or any other information you think is important to the request here: 
https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/26292065-Remove-Exact-Match-Requirement-in-On-Page-for-Accents

You can also subscribe to the post so that you will receive updates from our product team regarding this request. Just make sure you are signed into your Moz account when you visit the page.

I hope this helps. Please let us know if you need any further assistance.

[Litz]

Thank you Miranda, i subscribe to the feature request.

[ChiarynMiranda]

You are very welcome! Our product team has already commented and it looks like we will be working on making this change down the line.