Author: DWGtalks

What Is Semantic Search and What is the Context in Today’s SEO?

Search engine technology has progressed substantially and will continue to do so. Semantic (context-based) search has become increasingly important for SEO. It is important and can work for you.

SEO is transitioning from multitudes of backlinks and keywords to high quality backlinks and from long tail keyword and search queries to fast websites with semantic search.

The Search Algorithms have added, replaced or modified many of the variables that are used for placement/ranking. Previously, the focus has been on speed, cohesive content and congruity, The focus since early summer 2021 has been on understanding intent and action, as well as the context (semantics) that surrounds them.

Optimization has changed. The days of reverse-engineering content to improve rankings are gone and just discovering keywords is no longer sufficient.

You must provide rich information that provides context surrounding the long-tail keywords and have a strong grasp on the user’s purpose. This combination is essential for SEO, since AI and NLP (natural language processing) are being embedded in to search engines in order to better understand the context and users of search. So, in short, semantic search is a search engine’s attempt to produce the most accurate results possible based on the end users’ intent, query context, and word relationships. In another word, semantic search, tries to process and understand natural language in the same manner as a human would.

Semantic search on the web extends nearly two decades. Whether it was Powerset or SHOE in the 2000’s or the google knowledge graph in 2010 which eventually led to Hummingbird, RankBrain and BERT. All these engines are attempting to create the Semantic Web where intent and query is matched as closely as possible with the provided content.

How do you succeed with semantic search?

Most of you who know me (Nami), know that I have been a strong advocate of structured data. Going back to 2013, DWG first advised our clients that they need to create structured data to inform search engines of their shows, events, products, content, and location.

Well, don’t be surprised then if I tell you the structured data is more important than ever. But structured data by itself, especially if not used properly can prove to be detrimental.

First as always, is your content. The age of keywords alone has long passed, so look through your pages and give your audience, a comprehensive answer and include long-tail (4 – 5 words). Before digging into more technical information, provide content that answers a typical inquiry simply and concisely at the top of the page.

Consider providing “comprehensive guidance” and more complete resources that your readers will find useful instead of dozens of small, disjointed pages, each with its own topic. Think of big themes in your field that you can go into detail about. By focusing on people’s intentions, you can build a comprehensive, creative, and high-quality content strategy.

This strategy will focus on a list of subjects for content generation that focuses on the searches that bring users to your or your competitor’s website. Focus on the real question that is being answered and not the individual keywords.

Now that you have these pages, circle back and recheck the basics:

  1. Long Tail keywords, Nice URLs, Meta tags, H1, and H2 Tags
  2. Authoritative Backlinks
  3. Use Schema.org (structured data) to help the search engines present your information in more ways
  4. Accessibility and WCAG audit – Even though it is intended for accessibility testing, this will help you find many of possible short falls of your SEO and even help your SEO in places.
  5. Site Speed – getting your site speed up is essential – Minify resources, compress images, use caching, and if possible, use a CDN.
  6. Information Design – Create a logical Information structure for your site and make sure there is a logical relationship between your content for a better user experience.

–Nami

Top 4 reasons – Why Keyword Strings are important in SEO

Keyword strings or key phrases are a significant SEO tool not only for traffic generation but also to boost domain authority. With better SEO keyword targeting, you can improve your site positioning in Google and other search engines. While there is a change in how search engines use keywords and, thus, how you use them in your site…they are still important to define.

Let’s become familiar with keywords and their significance to build your Google search positioning and get ranked in google results:

  1. Keywords help your site to get listed in Google SERP results.

What is Keyword Optimization?

The impact of keywords in SEO is straightforward. At the point when the user opens Google.com and searches for required information such as services or products – they enter their related words or expressions or phrases in the search box. In almost no time, Google displays results that incorporates the list of websites which includes those keywords shown in the matching region.

A well organized site that has the most relevant content (using the key phrases) gets better positioning in organic search results.

  1. Understanding keyword types

For results oriented SEO, you should use various types of keywords in the website content such as short tail keywords and Long tail keywords.

What are Short Tail Keywords? Short tail keywords are terms with only one to three words. For example, “web app development”. Or maybe more generic terms like “web design”.

What are Long Tail Keywords? Long-tail keywords are highly focused search phrases that tend to convert exceptionally well. These are detailed and custom phrases that contain more than three words. For example:  “web developers near me” or “how do I seo my website Los Angeles.”

  1. Using targeted keywords help to drive traffic to your site.

How to Optimize a Website?

Any word is considered as a keyword when it gets numerous hunts or inquiries from web search in a month. More often than not, users type longer sentences as described above as keyword strings. These tend to target content very specific to you and your website content.

Long tail keywords are increasingly compelling in comparison to short tail keywords.   You should keep your list of long-tail keywords at the ready for content and marketing writing (and also check their performance in your Search Console).

Ideally, short-tail keywords are useful for titles and long-tail keywords can be included the website content since it will drive organic focused traffic from the search engine.

  1. Keyword density helps in ranking your website.

In simple terms, the keyword density is without the richness (quality and quantity) of content that includes the targeted keyword strings. At the point when the google bots crawl and index the content, it will determine from the keyword density that for which focused keywords your website should rank.   But keep in mind – the content must be relevant and readable…not just key-word filled text.

What number of keywords you should target in SEO?

According to google guidelines, using an excessive number of keywords will be considered as spam can lead to google penalty. It is advisable to use less than 2% of keywords in about 1000 words of content per page.

It is very important to select and include keywords carefully so that the search engines can define the subject and intent of the webpage – thus you get relevant results and appropriate traffic. If you want to rank your site in top positions in google search results and to drive organic traffic, then you need to optimize each page and its content of website for those relevant and targeted SEO keywords.

Dream Warrior Group, a Los Angeles SEO Company, provides the needed solutions for your online marketing needs. Our expertise includes Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing & Google PPC campaigns. Call us now at 818.610.3316 or click here.