Jonathan Saipe

Writing for the Web: The Importance of Synonyms

20 November 2008, Jonathan Saipe


writing for the webWhen carrying out our writing for the web training course, one of the most prevailing ranking factors discussed is the use and application of synonyms.

What is a synonym?

Synonyms are words or terms with similar or identical meanings. So, for example, synonyms of our “SEO copywriting” course could be “writing for the web”, “online copywriting”, “web copywriting” and so on.

Given the fact the searchers are likely to type any of the above keyphrases into Google when searching for a web copywriting course, it is blindingly obvious that the use of synonyms within our on-page copy, our website metadata and internal and external links will improve our potential for higher rankings on a broader array of search terms.

Put another way, synonyms will widen our marketing funnel and attract not only a greater number of searches, but they will hopefully increase the contextual strength of that particular web page thereby increasing its search rank or authority.

Synonyms are not only useful for keyword based search engines, but will become increasingly more important when search engines fully embrace latent semantic indexing (LSI) where the concept of theme will dominate keyword algorithms.

Within an LSI search algorithm, mixing synonyms with similarly themed long tail keyphrases, singular and plural terms and even different tenses, will strengthen our theme and therefore increase the chances of a higher search engine ranking.