Semantic Mapping, Because a Keyword Isn`t Good Enough - Starting With a Rough Guide
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To attract people, you want to optimize your site for ideas, not keywords for web spiders. Of course, your ideas will bring about keywords. Search these keywords and make a list of what good, eye-catching phrases and terms stick out among your competition. Keep these in mind when organizing your site. When placing your keywords in context, you’ll know how to distinguish yourself yet provide significant phrases for the SERPs to pick up.
When you have a draft of your site finished, read it as if you were a search engine. Are there any sentences around your keywords that would not attract a click for any reason? Keep an eye on unrelated ideas being near each other in the text even if an image or horizontal rule separates them. Watching keywords within content can be difficult, but it can pay off.
Of course you’re aware that you need to be thinking of what a person typing your keyword is thinking. Sure, somebody typing “dinner recipe” is probably hungry, but what situation are they in? Obviously, they don’t have a specific dinner in mind. Providing a general description is okay. But when I typed “pasta dinner recipe,” but of the follow appeared:
“Thousands of recipes submitted by home cooks. Searchable database, and menu ideas. Most recipes are reviewed and rated by users.”
“Pronto Pasta Dinner ... Sodium: 550 mg Carbohydrates: 35 g Dietary Fiber: <1 g Protein: 13 g. Recipe and photograph provided courtesy of Land O Lakes”
Which one is more click-worthy is obvious. Would you rather start hunting for pasta all over after clicking on a general description, or just right to what looks like the desired content?
I don’t mean to ignore titles while I talk about descriptions. They are also important. In the general search, “turkey” and “meatloaf” in a title will draw some attention from a few people. But because it was so specific it easily clashed with what I wanted. If your keywords happen to be “turkey dinner recipe,” that is a pretty pathetic cry for attention. It achieves no distinction from other turkey dinners.
You want to watch your title on these kinds of pages. Although the title is great for getting high on search results, it can cause somebody to quickly skip reading your results. This is a balance you have to play with.
There may well be more possibilities for semantic search to cover, but this is a starting point. Suffice it to say that optimizing for search engines means more than looking good to a machine. It means getting clicks from humans.
Eventually, we may even see more intelligent searches that rely on highly complex Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), and keeping your content and keywords relevant and integrated like this will help you rank well in them. It is those who try to trick search engines and those who don’t optimize properly (or at all) that look very bad to people staring at SERPs and LSI searches.
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