Singular vs. Plural extrapolating from wordtracker

It would seem from the wordtracker that "widgets" is better than "widget"

[umbria]

Taking a look at the wordtracker top 200 long term report, I was struck by the frequency of plural forms of words. Most common nouns in the list were plural e.g. hotels, lyrics, jokes, pictures, maps, games.

This reaffirmed my gut feeling that people are more likely to use the plural keywords than the singular when searching for most items. I'm going to look for "Moosejaw hotels" not "Moosejaw hotel" and "Jazz Butcher lyrics" not "Jazz Butcher lyric."

Proper names (e.g. yahoo, mapquest) uncountable nouns and abstractions (e.g. weight loss, music) seemed to be the only exceptions

Would people agree that if you are dealing with a generic object the plural form is usually better? Wordtracker seems to suggest this. Am I extrapolating too far or generalizing overmuch?

[biggles]

Suspect you're right that in a general plurals are more prevelant search terms.

e.g Wordtracker's count/predict numbers

new york hotel - Count figure: 206; Predict figure: 218
new york hotels - Count figure: 1,664; Predict figure: 1,764

Suggest however you still check Wordtracker for comparative popularity of both plural and singular forms for your particular niche. The key search engines treat plural and singular keywords separately these days - i.e. you can no longer cover singular and plural forms with just plurals (word stemming).

e.g. a search in Google for "hotel" returns 49,500,000 results. "hotels" returns 36,100,000

A thread on this at [webmasterworld.com ]

[savvy1]

Yes I would agree - both from looking at wordtracker, and more from personal experience (limited of course..) from my own search and from watching others search (lot of shoulder surfing!lol!)

It just sounds right to look up new your hotels, or blue widgets..not the other way around..