Different word forms

Hello,

Some keywords can be written in different ways. To take an obvious example in poker, holdem or hold'em.

The official and dictionary name is hold'em.

But it seems that google sometimes treats hold'em as 2 words, hold and em, so that it may take hold as a keyword, which it is not.

The question is what is the best strategy with respect SEO:
- always use the word holdem
- always use the word hold'em
- use both 50-50

What about Holdem and Hold'em, does the caps matter(I do not think so)?

You want to use both by Either creating 2 different pages, or one page with both keywords which the more important one first and then the secondary, E.g.:
"Texas Hold'em Tournaments - Find Texas Holdem in your area."

I mean this is at the website level.
Every page contains these 2 words.

Optimise for all versions.

what do you mean all versions?optimize?

Optimise for:
holdem / hold'em / hold 'em and hold em...
The last 2 have the biggest competition, suggesting they are the more popular versions (and - as expected - I don't see any websites ranking for just "hold" in the top spots, so I wouldn't think that's an issue.)

let me give an example which may clarify.

imagine you have a site about entrepreneurship, and IMAGINE, because it is not as exact as in my case, that people can either say entrepreneur or entreprenuer.

This is the site keyword.

So how do you proceeed?

clickyb i am not sure what you are saying.

this is the same word, how to write it?

what to you mean

Write it all 4 ways and (more importantly) get links / anchors for all 4 versions...
Or just pick one (whatever you coinsider to be the "correct form").

In your previous example I would optimise for entrepreneur and include the mis-spelling somewhere in the site to catch folks who type it that way but it's really a different issue because Hold' em is much more competitive so you probably have competitors who deliberately target only one in an effort to rank visibly in at least one set of serps.

yes this is kind of what i am asking.
say for example there are ONLY 2 spelling, holdem and hold'em, and say hold'em is 4 times more popular; question:
1/ if i only use hold'em, then obv i optimize hold'em, but does it mean i killed holdem
2. say i use 50-50; does it mean i screwed hold'em because given that he is so much more predominant, i should do 80% hold'em-20% holdem
3. in summary is there some kind of rule, or is it totally ad hoc or what?

It is funny, the title of my thread has changed

Anyway I am going to ask something else, which is prolly trivial for half of you, so say it is for the other half.

Is there such a thing as keyword at the site level? Of course, at the page level, there is. But say there are 2 sites about condoms; site1 has 100 pages and uses the word condom 250 times; site2 has 1,000 pages and uses the word 3,000 times.

I assume site2 will have better ranking in the serps for any query everything else being equal .

So there must be some keyword count at the site level, and you want your top 5 keywords to appear 1,000's of times, am I right?

When google delivers the results page it is based on a given page within your site that it feels that is most relevant for that keyword and as such no site has site wide keywords. (although they do have a theme)

In the situation that you are talking about you have a couple of choices.

1, you use the spelling that returns the most amount of
searches

2,you use the correct spelling

3,you use a combination of the two.

All of the options have their merits and only you can decide. Personally i would go for the most searches in this case as doing so will not effect the quality of your writing.

You the need to optimize the page for your choice. eg ensure the proper use of page titles H1 tags etc, then you need to back this up with good quality links that contain the chosen version of the keyword in the anchor text.

One more thing, don't over use the keywords in your text. Use it in the appropriate places and write naturally. Just having the keyword repeated a number of times wont make you rank any higher. The SE's can work out what a page is about, over use a word for the sake of this and you risk it looking spamy!

indeed I agree with...

...

your signature lewis

edit: just kidding

First let's drop the word spam, which is not the concern of the OP.

Indeed the reason I am asking is because there are sites which rank very well consistently for a number of related keywords.

These keywords are very competitive and the pages on these sites are good, but there are tons of other sites with similarly good pages. So why are there at the top?

pr is one reason, there are pr5; the only higher pr are pr6 which naturally reach the top but the pr6 sites are not aggressive marketers, there are true brands.

So what I am trying to say is that one of the reason why these sites reach the top is that there are kind of recognized authorities because they have 1000's of pages with the keyword or related keyword.

Am I completely off?