The term ‘keyword stemming’ refers to “Google’s ability to understand different word forms of a specific search query”. The search engine analyze and interprets various forms of the words that you enter as keywords and leads you to comprehensive search results.

The Yoast contributor Marieke van de Rakt has shared an article highlighting different aspects of keyword stemming.

Marieke says, “Google can read and analyze texts very well. Google understands that ‘walk’, ‘walking’, ‘walked’, ‘walks’ all boils down to the same thing. Also, Google knows that ‘baby’ is basically the same thing as babies. Optimizing your text for an exact match keyword isn’t a very smart thing to do. That’s why we introduced word form recognition in Yoast SEO Premium. You can now optimize your post and we’ll analyze the different word forms like walk, walks and walking. For longer tail keywords, we also recognize the words if you decide to use them in a different word order.

Stemming or keyword stemming refers to Google’s ability to understand different word forms of a specific search query. It is called stemming because it comes from the word stem, base or root form. If you use the word ‘buy’ in a sentence, a stemming algorithm would recognize the words ‘buys’, ‘buying’ and ‘bought’ as variations of the word ‘buy’ as well. Some SEOs also differ between stemming and lemmatization”.

Read the full article on the following page.

What is keyword stemming?

Yoast

Sharing is caring