Language Differences in Search

We often hear the phrase “two countries separated by a common language”, usually referring to the UK and the USA. This language barrier is just as obvious in search as it is when talking in person.

For a case in point, yesterday, a Googler posted a blog on the main Google Blog that I had to resort to searching to double check what they were talking about. It was entitled March is for Hoops.

A quick clickthrough some of the links showed that I was right – hoops means basketball. However, the post author managed to write the whole post about Google’s tools for basketball, without actually mentioning basketball in the text.

Because search is very dependent on on-page factors, especially the words that you use, it is important to recognise when you are talking about a subject that has more than one name, and make sure you use the different versions of it. Whilst the algorithms are quite clever about giving the search user the correct results, using technologies such as latent semantic indexing it is still in the interests of the site owner to use as many combinations of the words themselves as they can.

When we talk about increasing the long tail this is one of the techniques that you can use, making sure that you use synonyms for your main words. If you talk about dogs, make sure you also refer to canine. If you talk about dieting, also mention weight loss. If you talk about football with the US market in mind, also talk about soccer.

So when you write your next site content, take a good look at the words you use and see if you can replace any with alternat

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