Newcomers to SEO ask questions about many things. Few areas seem to inspire as much confusion as keywords, however. Fortunately, SEO forums let veteran SEOs share their expertise with newcomers. Keep reading for some questions and answers about keywords culled from our own SEO Chat forums.
If you're interested in delving more deeply into the keyword topics discussed here, there's an entire forum section devoted to keywords: http://forums.seochat.com/keywords-30/. You'll find questions about what keywords to pick, how many, how to use them, keyword analysis tools, and so forth. You'll even find threads that cover factors other than keywords – when both sites are keyword-rich in the same niche, yet one outranks the other. I'll be including an example of that later in this article.
One question that comes up regularly involves targeting markets in the UK vs. the US. A recent poster noted that his UK-based website uses the term “jewellery” and has been ranking very well for it. But his company wants to expand into US and Canadian markets, where searchers use “jewelry.” Some posters advised him to add “jewelry” as a new keyword to new pages on his site, and make sure the content is unique.
One respondent in the jewelry business, though, noted that “it does not make a big difference at all.” And respected SEO Chat member drelly observed that “If you do a search on Google, you will see that it already knows they are the same word.” I tried the experiment myself, and I did get different results for “jewelry” and “jewellery.” I did note one interesting result in the experiment: Google knows where I live, and included results for “jewellery” near my own location. Since I live in the US, those retailers almost certainly did NOT use “jewellery” on their websites. I doubt that links to their sites used that spelling of the word in the anchor text, either.
Does Google's knowledge extend to regional differences when the word is completely different? That is, does Google know that “soda” and “pop” describe the same beverage in different parts of the US? That's a question I can't answer, but it sounds ripe for experimentation.
Choosing Keywords 
