Semantic Mapping, Because a Keyword Isn`t Good Enough
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So you’ve built a webpage and pulled it to the top of Google. You may not want to hear it, but that might not be enough. You can sit in the top tier or results for your keyword and lose all your clicks the guy below you. Optimizing for search engines means far more than simply getting a high ranking; it means getting people from search results to your site.
Being in the front should only be viewed as an opportunity to get a visitor. Not an end goal. It may get a few “dumb” click-throughs just by being there, but rank is not the sole factor in determining how much good exposure you will be getting. There are other aspects of SEO in the works here too.
There are a couple things that can keep a searcher scanning right past your result. First is that the person searching often has more on mind than two keywords and page rank. There is a whole world of reasons that person is searching, which you need to appeal to. At this point, search engines aren’t powerful enough to really understand what people want to find, so you will have to help your searchers find you.
The second thing that keeps people scanning past entries and moving onto ones with lower rank is that they do not read every word of description. They may scan titles. If a title seems promising, they scan for a phrase or word that pops out of the description. After being burned too many times by high-ranking link farms and irrelevant sites, web searchers with more than a day of experience are going to be moving through results similarly.
This is where many blackhat SEOs fail. This is where not optimizing your page means failure. Not only does your page have to return a legible listing in the SERPs, but you have to be fairly certain it will really spark interest in somebody who is searching for you. The idea has been loosely termed “semantic mapping.”
The idea of “search semantics” or “semantic mapping” is all based on the idea that a person browsing the web is not a dumb clicker. They have entered your keyword but may not be interested in your page. There is an overlying concept behind the words the person chose which is more than those words can express.
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