Is It Necessary To Use Synonyms In Your Website Content

In one of the Webmasterhelp videos recently the search engine guru, Matt Cutts tries to explain whether it is necessary to use synonyms of the important terms and important key phrases in your website. Google claims that it can understand words and synonyms and we do see this in the search results Google pulling out websites that contain all the related terms. So Google will be able to understand your website’s content and relate your website to a certain extent to the related terms even without using those synonyms in your text. However, there is still an element of uncertainty. There are possibilities that Google misses out your website and picks out other pages that have been optimized for the exact search terms.

For example if you are into car insurance business, it is possible that your customers make their searches using the term, ‘car insurance’ or ‘automobile insurance’ with the latter one being more of a general term. In such scenarios, it is better that you make use of both terms in your text rather than leaving things for chances.

Here Matt Cutts instructs webmasters that they use the synonyms in a natural way without giving room for any suspicion of spamming. If your users are likely to search for your products or services using the synonyms, then create natural flowing content and introduce the search terms without obstructing the flow of the text. You should work with experienced SEO writers that know how to create search engine friendly content using as many synonyms as possible.

Why this should be an area of concern? Here are few factors that we should take into consideration. One of the concerns being that some webmasters feel that if you concentrate on just one term, you will be able to optimize the page better for a single term rather than concentrating on multiple keywords on the same page. In majority of cases, such an approach would leave things to chances. Google has to intuit what your website content is about and to associate your website to other relevant searches.

Matt Cutts suggests that you do not leave things to chances and there is no harm introducing the synonyms of important terms in your content in a natural way. Here the term to be underlined is ‘in a natural way’. Do not randomly through the terms but create enough content in your pages so that you can introduce the terms in a natural way. Well thought out, good quality content is the key here. You need to put in enough efforts in this area and spend adequate time to create quality content. We cannot emphasize here enough the importance of good quality content.

Another factor to be remembered here is that do not introduce too many variations of your search terms trying to cover everything possible in the same page. Using too many terms in the same page can indeed dilute the keyword strength of your main keywords.

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