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Semantic SEO

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When I kept joking about Google being something like a fast evolving killer A.I. on other older posts of ours, it was partly serious. One evidence of this is the existence of Semantic SEO.

 

Like cavemen accidentally discovering fire, we’ve realized that this is a type of SEO that refers to questions or search phrases that gives you meaningful and related results. The cool thing here is that, these search results will not contain the exact keywords you used. It’s weird that the term was already around during the early 2000’s (2004) and everyone back then until the Hummingbird came out was just ramming keywords left and right.

 

Let’s investigate. Would you like to know more?

 

 

You might ask, wait, how are these search results relevant if they don’t contain the exact keywords I was looking for?

 

That’s the point of Semantic SEO. It will give you pages that have content that’s got relevance, that didn’t necessarily used keywords to explain things. Since it explains and informs a reader better, these types of content will be displayed once Google decides that they are indeed helpful to the question or query. This happens because of Google’s every evolving system that at this point tries to understand what a searcher really wants to find out or learn online, and offers the best possible set of search results in its index.

 

This is why for quite a while, there were topics running around online that kept asking questions like, are keywords useless now that Semantic SEO is happening. To answer that question however, yeah, they’re still important of course. It’s just that everyone needs to learn that the way content is made now is different.

 

Since these search results are coming up because of actual questions, the types of keywords you will most likely end up using are those longer tailed keywords. Because the way people search the web has changed as well, so should your targeted keyword terms. People will most likely type in longer search queries. So keep that in mind when you start collecting keywords you’ll be using.

 

This then involves some research. Because you will need to know what the people are actually using and what term Google is considering as semantically related.

 

To do that, you can search anything that can be considered a bit long tail:

 

 

And on the very bottom you will be able to see a part where Google will suggest semantically related terms and the search results that come with them.

 

 

With these, you can then mod your content better and shape it in such a way, that Google will immediately consider including you and your content on a few of these semantic searches.

Amidst all this fuss about Semantics, you might be surprised that there are other benefits when you focus all you content in this strategy.

 

Remember our recent topic about Wikipedia being displayed in a Paragraph snippet? Yes, landing a search result like that is easier if your content is semantically made.

Imagine if you actually have multiple pages that serves content that can directly answer the usual questions that people go online to search for? You will have multiple search results there that display as paragraph snippet types of organic search results, complete with an image and valuable information arranged in bullet form.

 

Not only that, you will most likely be on the top of the search results most of the time.

 

Value and quality are the two main basic ingredients in all of this. If you’re more of a white hat type of SEO, (that’s a good thing) incorporating this in your strategies is a sure fire way to have long lasting effects. Artificial intelligence in search has moved beyond just keywords and we all should learn to surf this wave.

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