Ranking on synonyms

[member22]

Hi,

I got one question on ranking on synonyms ! I know of website that is is ranked in the same position for a certain keyword ( let's take for ex "green plant" and "green flower " )

I was wondering how he manages to do that because I don't so far.. and it seems to me that the way to do this is to vary the words on your website. Have some pages with the word "plant" and some pages with the word " flower "?

is it the way it works because my website only talks about plants and on "plant " I rank first but on flower i rank 15 ! ( I never have the word flower on my website and i am thinking that could be the reason but if I vary the words i am afraid i am not going to rank on plant anymore ?

Could anyone tell me how to rank it the same position for 2 different words that i guess are " almost synonyms "

Thank you,

[Robert Charlton]

Varying the inbound links might help.

Does your competitor have both "plant" and "flower" on his site, and, in particular, on the page that ranks for both?

(Or, does he rank on these for different pages?)

[member22]

Ok about the inbound links .

Yes my competitor has "plant" and "flowers" on his site on the page that ranks for both. However he has got 90 % "plant" and 10 % "flower" !

[tedster]

As odd as it may sound at first, having some other related words like "root", "seed" and so on can also have a positive effect.

In the science of Information Retrieval (IR) this is called co-occurrence. Going with the example of "green plant", measuring term co-ocurrence is one way that a search engine may try to sort out different meanings of "green plant", such as "a soil based organism based on chlorophyl" and "a manufacturing facility that is eco-friendly".

With Google, this approach can be a bit touchy. Stuffing in too many co-occuring phrases can earn you a penalty (looks like scraper snippets) but not having any at all can also be a problem (over-optimized for one phrase).