SEO Relevance Destroyers and Semantic Search

August 18, 2021

Search Engine Journal describes to SEO professionals how the game has changed since early days, when it was all about keywords and backlinks, in “Semantic Search: What it Is & Why it Matters.” Writer Aleh Barysevich emphasizes:

“Now, you need to understand what those keywords mean, provide rich information that contextualizes those keywords, and firmly understand user intent. These things are vital for SEO in an age of semantic search, where machine learning and natural language processing are helping search engines understand context and consumers better. In this piece, you’ll learn what semantic search is, why it’s essential for SEO, and how to optimize your content for it.”

Semantic search strives to comprehend each searcher’s intent, a query’s context, and the relationships between words. The increased use of voice search adds another level of complexity. Barysevich traces Google’s semantic search evolution from 2012’s Knowledge Graph to 2019’s BERT. SEO advice follows, including tips like these: focus on topics instead of keywords, optimize site structure, and continue to offer authoritative backlinks. The write-up concludes:

“Understanding how Google understands intent in intelligent ways is essential to SEO. Semantic search should be top of mind when creating content. In conjunction, do not forget about how this works with Google E-A-T principles. Mediocre content offerings and old-school SEO tricks simply won’t cut it anymore, especially as search engines get better at understanding context, the relationships between concepts, and user intent. Content should be relevant and high-quality, but it should also zero in on searcher intent and be technically optimized for indexing and ranking. If you manage to strike that balance, then you’re on the right track.”

Or one could simply purchase Google ads. That’s where traffic really comes from, right?

Cynthia Murrell, August 17, 2021

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under News, Semantic, SEO

Comments

Comments are closed.

Search the site
Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive

Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.