News Flash: SEO Leads to Buying Ads with or without Semantic Blabber
June 26, 2020
A Search Engine Optimization blog offers some axioms on semantic search for a crowd used to manipulating keywords, backlinks, URL structure, and the like. David Amerland posts, “Five Semantic Search Principles to Help Organize your Content and Marketing.” To us, the result seems like a reconstruction of an Incan incantation with a mystical diagram tossed in for added magic. Amerland writes:
“Semantic search is as open to analysis and interpretation of the elements that govern it as the good ol’ Boolean search of the past was. Yet the effort required to achieve a positive outcome (i.e. higher visibility in search) is now every bit as labor and cost intensive as doing the right thing. Semantic search, in other words, does not automatically make us all behave in a morally better way because it is the right thing to do. It makes us behave morally better because there is no viable alternative.”
So far so good. The piece then gets into search as psychology. We’re told the structure of search has always shaped users’ perceptions of the information presented and, by extension, their behaviors. We cannot argue with that much. Then Amerland continues:
“Semantic search has much in common with Gestalt psychology. It looks at the phenomena it studies as organized and structured wholes rather than the sum of their parts and, like semantic search, it deals with entities and how we perceive them. The question that arises with semantic search, now, is that since there are so many elements that drive it and since many of them are roughly equal so that none has a significant advantage over the other, how can we create a strategy that actually works? This is where Gestalt psychology comes into its own.”
Gestalt psychology as an SEO strategy—interesting. See the article to go further down the rabbit hole, where it discusses, with illustrations, its five principles: the law of proximity, the law of similarity, the law of perceptual organization, the law of symmetry, and the law of closure. We grant that SEO professionals are nothing if not creative, but perhaps there is such a thing as over thinking one’s approach to algorithm manipulation.
Cynthia Murrell, June 11, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
