SEO is always evolving - find out how

This practice formed the foundation of all our SEO work for years, but now this is all changing, in fact it can be said that the only constant in SEO is the pace at which it changes. Over recent months Google has drastically improved the way in which it looks at the web, and with the launch of the Humming Bird update we get a glimpse at where Google sees organic search in the future.

Google no longer looks at single keywords in isolation and probably hasn't done for some time and this is where we see terms like topic modelling and semantic search appearing in our SEO vocabulary. These terms sound fancy and indeed there is some very fancy maths and data analysis that goes into how these ideas work, however for our SEO purposes we simply need to know how they impact our optimisation efforts.

Old school keyword research is dead

We need to change our approach to the age old practice of keyword research and onsite optimisation. Instead of focusing on primary, secondary and perhaps tertiary keywords per page we need to go beyond this, some of the areas we now need to look at include:

Synonyms and close variants:

Google has a massive database or corpus of synonyms and has a very good understanding of how they relate to each other. Google is able to match relevant content to this different version of essentially the same thing. For example if I had a website optimised for cat food, Google is able to recognise searches such as cat snacks, cat treats, cat meals etc. as relevant. What does this mean from an SEO perspective? It means that we now need to expand our keyword research; we now need to look at buckets of keywords and use variants of our targeted keywords to create value and enrich our content with greater meaning.

Semantic distance:

Google and other search engines are able to work out the connection between words and phrases and can determine concepts from these relationships; in essence Google is able, by looking at where words are positioned in relation to each other to link relevance and further their understanding of the context and content on our web pages.

An area we have been focused on over the last year for our clients has been Schema.org. This is a mark-up language that gives Google and search engines detailed information on how to semantically read the content on our client's pages.

Term frequency - inverse document frequency:

In the old days we spoke about keyword density and would try and get keywords onto our page as many times as possible. This fell away many years ago, but recent studies and patents from Google show that they are using a metric whereby they measure the frequency in which a keyword is used in a single document against the frequency that keyword appears in a much larger collection of documents, this in turn helps Google identify the importance of a keyword phrase.

These are just a few of the new areas we as SEO specialists need to be looking at and becoming familiar with, and the idea of semantic search is something we will be unpacking in further articles, but in a nutshell this means we need to be focused on:

• Carry out keyword research around topics and themes rather than isolated keywords.

• Use natural variations and synonyms to flesh out your content and provided added context and meaning to the search engines. Also use Schema to mark up your content to further aid Google in this process.

• Structure your content in a well thought out and logical manner, ensuring that content is themed together in paragraphs and not spread randomly over your page.

The process of keyword research and onsite content optimisation has changed and continues to do so, it is vital that you or your SEO agency keep abreast of these changes to ensure maximum exposure in the search results.