Google has become smart enough to understand different forms of words. Google knows that “walk”, “walks”, “walking”, and “walked” belong to the same thing. The reason we are talking about this aspect is that there are many people out there who try to focus on the exact match of the keywords while ignoring whether or not the exact keyword insertion makes sense. It is not a very smart move to make.
In this scenario, it gets important to pay attention to the morphology recognition. And this is where we also need to talk about keyword stemming. Good thing is that many of the SEOs talk about it already. Here, you may wonder what keyword stemming is. How is keyword stemming related to the morphology recognition? And what doesn’t it has to do with SEO. This is what we are going to talk about in this article.
What is keyword stemming?
Keyword stemming is basically the Google ability to understand different forms of words. If you are using the word “buy” in your keywords, Google will understand that the words “buying”, “buys”, and “bought” are all variations.
It’s been quite a while since Google has been using keyword stemming in its algorithm. Rand Fishkin and Bill Slawski talked about this topic 10 years ago. Google started using keyword stemming for the languages other than English much later. Now, Google is quite advanced and, so, the use of exact match keywords doesn’t make sense unless it fits in the content perfectly.
Stemming and word forms
Talking about the keyword stemming, we basically refer to the capability of search engine to identify different forms of a specific word. However, Google has not become smarter enough to identify the synonyms. However, you can use certain plugins to manage the keywords and their synonyms if you are working with a CMS like WordPress. The plugin to talk about in this regard is the Yoast SEO.
Stemming and SEO
As mentioned above, Google has become smarter with time. Google doesn’t only understand the text but it has also started understanding context. This is the reason that users now need to focus on writing awesome content. Keyword stuffing doesn’t work anymore. As a matter of fact, this practice is what both Google and users hate.
In order to make your content pleasant, you will need to use the synonyms and related keywords quite carefully. For this purpose, you need to use different forms of words. Stemming is not something challenging if you want to write awesome content.