Semantic Mapping, Because a Keyword Isn`t Good Enough - Search Semantics
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Semantics, the study of meanings and connections between words, can prove to be a friend to a good SEO. After all, search engines are textual programs. Their ability to judge context and meaning in the items they index is severely limited. While Google Labs is debuting a My Search History feature (to track browsing patterns and supply customized results), it is still a far cry from a truly intelligent search. This is where your job as an SEO comes in.
To make up for the shortcomings in search engines, a responsible SEO has to understand how sites will appear to human searchers. To clarify, I’ll recall a recent report from Enquiro, an eye tracking study. It raised questions about how people view search results. You may have heard about Google’s “golden triangle,” which is derived from the report. Basically, it shows that people view the full width of search results at the top of the page, then they scan down the left side of the page.
The scanning follows an F pattern, moving down the left of the page and shooting over to the right if something catches their eye. As they get lower down the page, it takes a bit more help to get their eyes over to the right of the page. This is how the lower arms of the F are formed.
The search engine users in the study moved their eyes quickly between results and used their peripheral vision to notice appealing words and phrases. They did not click top results simply because they were at the top. Likewise, simply because sponsored links were there, surfers did not necessarily even see them.
So optimizing for search engines is great, but useless unless you consider how the page will look to a human being. A search engine is not going to browse your page and buy 500 widgets a week. People who are attracted to your result will, though.
Naturally, you cannot always predict precisely what Google or other engines will pull as the description of your site, but you do control it. Look at your page to find what text search engines see. Look at what would be unappealing to a person if the search engine randomly cut a few words for the search results.
Also, read through the important parts of your webpage where your keywords appear. Make sure the keywords are in good context and that the search engine can pull information from before or after them. Do not put unrelated ideas near each other without transition. You know search engines can’t tell one paragraph from the next, and neither will people checking search results. We’ll start looking at more detail of this later.
Next: Semantic Mapping is Optimization for Humans >>
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