No-one liked grammar lessons at school. Not even teachers like them. They are difficult, technical, and dull. Grammar, although it is a vital component in communication, is simply too dry a concept for most of us to get excited about.

Strangely enough, a good grasp of grammar is vital in the world of search engine optimisation. This is not for the reasons you would think. Or not entirely. While good grammar does factor into the way your site communicates with the search engines, it’s not the area in which grammar features most prominently when it comes to SEO. But a good SEO consultant must have a thorough understanding of grammar to make keywords work.

We get caught up in the science of keywords and forget that, when it comes down to it, they are words. You can research your competitors thoroughly, but without the ability to convert a basic list of words into other, related terms, you are lost.

Thinking up related search terms is something that is done by people every day, purely on instinct. Nevertheless, when it comes to the professional approach of your site’s SEO, these instinctual understandings of English grammar need to be hammered down into academic terms. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about professional keyword research. When you’re researching your keywords, it is important to know what something is when you want to recognise it.

Take, for instance, synonyms. Without synonyms, most sites are floundering aimlessly in the sea of the internet. This is because people use synonyms unthinkingly all the time when making searches. Synonyms are words which are very close in meaning to each other. When it comes to search engines, if your first search term doesn’t work, try, and try again, preferably using a synonym.

Antonyms, the opposite of synonyms, have their place in the search world as well. This is because even though they are opposites, they are related terms that help the search engines place a site in context.

Adjectives are used all the time to help flesh out keywords. It can be handy to know your way around your adjectives when trying to work keywords into content.

Hyponyms come up very commonly in search terms. ‘Hyponym’ is the term for the many little words that come from one category. It’s a kind of way of describing the hierarchy of words. For instance, ‘chicken’ is a hyponym of ‘bird’. ‘Bird’ itself can be a hyponym of ‘animal’. Going the other way, the word in the higher sub-category is called a hypernym, so in the case of ‘chicken’ and ‘bird’, ‘bird’ is the hypernym for ‘chicken’. Knowing your hypernyms can come in handy particularly for e-commerce sites, as it can be helpful to break up products into their greater categories.

Finally, a holonym is the word which describes a larger whole. Meronym is the term for the opposite. For example, ‘twig’, ‘branch’ and ‘leaf’ are all meronyms for the holonym of ‘tree’. Going back to our e-commerce example, ‘denim accents’ or ‘corsetry’ might be meronym keywords your clothing site would use on its ’skirts’ holonym page.

These terms are all very confusing, as most grammar is. Knowing your way around them, however, can be extremely helpful when you want to research broad search terms for your keyword list.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 23rd, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under SEO Copywriting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.