Should I incorporate synonyms for important terms into my site?



If two terms are used essentially interchangeably, does Google realize that the terms are interchangeable? Should you be trying to use both terms, or just focus on one term to get the best search engine traffic? An example is EMR and EHR
techguy, Las Vegas

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23 thoughts on “Should I incorporate synonyms for important terms into my site?”

  1. Good question indeed! One of the best questions that I've heard in a while. There's no doubt the synonymous terms is the safer and better route. I mean why why even test if Google can recognize it or not when we can just use the same terms.

  2. should we or shouldnt we incorporate synonyms finally? and if it doesnt sound natural and look spammy what will happen? if it looks natural what will happen?

  3. Case in point!, Listen to Matt's Dialogue and note how many times he mentions USB, Flash and Stick. Also the mention of Google.

    The dialogue sounds natural because it IS!

    Just ensure your website content is written in a natural way, how would you describe your site to a person in the street?

  4. I summarized Matt’s message in such way:
    “Make sure that yours content look in natural way. The usage of synonyms is one of our criteria's to analyze how ‘natural’ text content is.”

    Matt, again, thank you for your advises.

  5. Matt confirmed what many expected, that the use of synonyms naturally is good for the publisher/SEO. (e.g. Internet marketing, marketing online)

  6. Quotes from this video;

    1. "artificial, or stilted or spammy…" 0:28
    2. "does it sounds stilted, does it sound artificial…" 1:19
    3. "artificial, stilted or spammy…" 1:27

    I guess that answers the question.

  7. Why can't the term, "Asian", be treated as an unisex term similar to other search terms such as "European", "African" or "American" on Google Image Search? Ironically, this only happens if you are in the US, where, the word, "teen(s)", is NOT necessarily a synonym of "teenager(s)". #MindBlowing

  8. You are right – my brain went off in another direction. As far as synonyms are concerned, I follow the same rule; try to capture different search phrases of what people would be potentially looking for. (Without being spammy as Matt points out)

  9. Acronyms may be a lot confusing as te web content is spreading and even Google team in charge of synonyms could not be aware of all about. But with knowledge graph, the web entity EMR in Medical context couldn't be associated to EHR ?

  10. Matt… How does Google handle the <dfn tag then? If the first time through you state something like "EMR or EHR" in a definition or <abbr tag with a hoverable popup that also gives the same definition for both (or reciprocal definitions) – wouldn't that be better???

  11. Good question. Luckily I've always assumed that it was my responsibility to optimize for both full title + acronym throughout meta data and site content. Not only for search results, but for usability; your users can easily get confused if you use too many acronyms.

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