How Semantics Affects Our Web Pages

Understanding how Google works semantically and how it indexes sites, will have a quite concrete effect on the way we build a web page, or how we should create it. Some SEO specialists, mostly those who have been around for a while, since the very beginning of the internet, have witnessed the evolution of the seekers architecture. However, not all of them could adapt their practices to the new and prevailing semantic reality. Thus, the idea of keyword still rules their actions, all of them tending to promote a specific word list, those much vaunted keywords.

Let us understand well: keywords themselves as tags-should only be considered to plan an Adwords campaign. In order to position a web site organically, we need to take a step beyond the keywords, and to think about factual semantic networks. It is required to advance from the unidimensionality of a simple word list to an evolutionary stage where the semantic framework of website texts gets more relevant.

What am I saying with these complicated words? That Google uses a technology named Latent Semantic Indexing, which beats techniques like stuffing, duplicated texts, hidden texts and any black hat technique to pump up keywords reverberation in our texts. Latent Semantic Indexing means that Google, which has the tiny task to index more than 3 million sites, has succeed in creating word lists that naturally relate with others, in a semantic way. For example, if I talk about mp4, it will surely be associated to player; or Italian sport cars to Ferrari. Try it yourself. Click here and you will see how Google ties in the phrase cell phone semantically. So, you will find bold mobile phone, cellphone, wireless phone, etc

When it comes to design our sites and to include texts on it, what does this specifically represent? Some practical considerations can be marked:

Use variety in your terms. Do not stick to a keyword, and create your texts with as many synonyms as possible. Make friends with the lexicon (a dictionary of synonyms and semantically related words).Enlarge your vocabulary.

Vary your anchor texts (your page internal links). For example, if one of your anchor texts is drywall (which will take you to the drywall section in your site), you can swap with other phrases such as Durlock building, ceilings and partition walls, internal walls, etc.

The practice that SEO experts call overoptimization", that is to say, those pages where the keyword is repeated ad nauseam, tend to rank worse than pages with semantically relevant texts.

Try this sandbox destined to test terms to Adsense campaigns. You will get a more complete list of semantically related terms, at least as connected as Google sees them.