Stemming

So what is stemming?  Stemming is the name for a technique that Google uses to recognize different plurality and tenses of words.  For example, Google would understand that the word “digging” is a different tense of the word “dig”.  similarly, the same principle applies to plurality.  Google knows that the term “dogs” comes from the root word “dog”.  So how does this help us with our SEO?
 

Another way that this aids us is in the selection of domain names.  Often times it is impossible to get an EMD (exact match domain) for our site.  However, there are often plural versions available which are almost as powerful.  While the plural version may be somewhat less powerful if you’re targeting the non-plural, it really is the next best option – by far!  There’s one more way that this knowledge can help our optimization.
 

What is stemming going to do for our rankings?
 

We can aim and rank for different variations of our keyword quite easily.  There are probably a lot fewer monthly searches for some of the variances of your keyword, but you can rank for these very easily.  Once you rank for your keyword, you can build links for the different variations and grab high (more likely HIGHER) positions for them.  This is going to get you more traffic AND it’s going to help you rank better for your exact keyword as well.  Using different tenses of your keyword in anchor text when backlinking is a lot like using LSI keywords to help support your main keyword.  It’s a great technique for increasing your ranking and looking a little more natural with your link building.  This should help you both with your on-page and off-page optimization and leave you with an answer to the question, what is stemming?
 

Understanding stemming helps us in a few ways.  For one, knowing that different tenses and pluralities of words are recognized takes some pressure off of us for using our keyword exactly every time.  There’s no sense making a grammatically incorrect sentence just to force in your exact keyword.  This goes for how you use your keywords in your text, as well as your title tags, header tags, and anchor text.