SEO

Semantics for SEO

July 11, 2008 By: Justin | 4 Comments

Semantics is the study of meaning and relationships and plays a role in SEO. Google makes its money from being successful at crawling, indexing, and ranking data. One important aspect of this procedure is being able to understand content in a manner that is more complex than keyword density. One way of doing this is Latent Semantics Analysis or LSA. Google may not use this exact approach, but Google is sure to use some similar system of semantic analysis to look at textual content.

Intro to SEO Semantics

By using semantics, search engines can have a basic understanding of the English language. There is an understanding of synoyms, antonyms, and polysemes. In addition, Google can related niches and keywords. They’re able to develop complex relationships with keywords through their huge database of information and linking relationships.

For example, Google can understand the following relationships for a Make Money Online site.

Make Money Online

  • Make Money
  • Make Money Online
  • Make Money Blogging
  • Make Money on eBay

Internet Marketing

Social Media Marketing

  • Social Media
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Web 2.0
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon

Blogging

  • Blogger
  • Wordpress
  • Plugins
  • RSS Feed

SEO

  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Link Building
  • Article Marketing
  • Directory Submissions
  • Dofollow
  • Nofollow

Google knows that the usage of any of the above keywords is related to the primary keyword of make money online. It can relate long tail keywords as well as related keywords and the long tails of those related keywords.

Role of Semantics when Writing for Search Engines

Knowing that Google uses semantics is important when writing your site’s content and building links. You should use this knowledge to solidify your page’s focus on a keyword.

Quick Note on Keyword Density

Google content analysis is more advance than keyword density. Do not stress keyword density. Keyword density will not help you rank higher. Anyone still teaching you to achieve a certain density is wrong. Keyword usage is important, but there is no set density that you should target. Simply use it natually, but ideas like LSA moves Google away from basic keyword density analysis. Keyword density is not a direct measure of relavancy. The usage of a keyword 10 times does not make it more relavant than a page that uses its keyword 3 times. If anything, the over usage of a keyword can hurt your rankings. The usage of semantics can be used to determine if a site is using natural language. An over optimized keyword stuffed page does not use natural language and may hurt your rankings.

Use Long Tails

Instead of trying to use your primary keyword over and over, use long tails. Research your keyword before you write your article to determine long tail keywords. Select two or three long tails that have your main keyword as their parent keyword. Use them in your content to support your main keyword and do it without keyword spamming. Not only does this create natural content, but this increases the number of terms you can rank for. You can now work your primary keyword as well as the long tails.

Related Terms

In addition to long tails, use related keywords. If you’re writing about SEO, talk about internet marketing. If you talk about McDonalds, talk about hamburgers. If you talk about hamburgers, discuss hot dogs. If Apple, discuss Mac and Ipod. These related terms will support your main keyword because Google understands the relationship. In addition, it will increase the number of keywords you can rank for.

Role of Semantics when Link Building

The classic advice of varying your anchor text. If you get too many links with the same anchor text, Google will consider it a Google bomb. Varying anchor text is important for two reasons. First, it looks natural. Having the same anchor text is a sign of self generated links. Second, semantics comes into play. You can use related anchor text to support your primary target keyword.

A post about BANS (Build a Niche Store) could use any of the follow keyword(s) as anchor text and still support the primary keyword.

  • BANS
  • BANS site
  • BANS ebay
  • Build A Niche Store
  • Make Money on eBay
  • Make Money Online
  • eBay Niche Store
  • Build an Online Store
  • eBay Affiliate

Google understands that all of these keywords are related.

Dominating Multiple Long Tails Keywords

By using this approach instead of keyword stuffing one keyword phrase, you’re able to dominate multiple keyword listings for long tails. You can rank for many long tails by simply mentioning the keyword. Instead of repeating one keyword phase over and over, use a semantically related keywords. This will reinforce your main keyword while also increasing the number of long tails you can rank for. As your page gains authority for the main keyword, your authority for the semantically related keywords will also increase. And the opposite is also true, as you gain authority for the semantically related keywords, your authority for the main keyword increases.

Conclusion

Understanding that Google uses semantics to evaluate content can help you improve your on site SEO. Simple measures like keyword density are out dated and should not be used to determine how targeted a page is. So when developing content, consider developing a list of long tails and related keywords that you can sprinkle through your content to help support your targeted keyword.

Filed Under SEO, Search Engines

Google Keyword Tool Changes

By: Justin | Leave a Comment

The Google Adwords keyword tool is one of many free keyword research tools that can be used for keyword research and selection. Traditionally this tool would only show relative search volume with bars instead of numbers. The tool has changed over to showing numerical data. It shows numerical data for both average search volume and average monthly search volume.

This a wonderful upgrade from Google and provides a great source of free data. Check it out.

Filed Under Keywords

Dominate Your Competition, Not Google

July 10, 2008 By: Justin | 3 Comments

Check out the Search Engine Optimization guide. So far I’ve talked about SEO basics, on site SEO, SEO design, keyword selection and keyword research, and about identifying long tails. Now it’s time to step it up into big boy SEO; dominating SERPS.

Dominating SERPS is about one thing: Beat EVERYONE in your way. Look at #1, #2, #3 ranked for for the keyword your want. Your ultimate goal is to spank their site into submission.

How is this done? Simple. Read my post about SEO ranking factors. Your goal is to out perform them on every single one of those factors. Optimize better. Design better. Structure your content better. Do everything I talk about in my SEO guide so far. Then get more links. Get more anchored links. Get more deep links. Get higher authority links. Determine what your competition has and BEAT them.

If you’re not competitive and don’t have a killer mentality… GET IT. There are guys out there willing to do ANYTHING to get that #1 ranking.

Find Your Competition

First, you need to determine who your competition is. Perform a Google search on your keyword, look at the top twenty. Those are the sites you’ll need to beat to perform well on Google. More specifically, you’ll want to look at the top 10, since page one gets the most traffic, and most specifically you want to look at the top three ranked sites.

Don’t just look ahead

Competitive analysis isn’t as simplistic as looking at the sites ahead of you. You need to look at who ranks below you. While you’re chasing the guy who holds #1, there are 10 sites chasing you. That brand new site on page 10 pulling in a few hundred links a week will give you hell in 3 months, so do not discount them. Focus on moving forward, but keep a mindful eye on your rear view mirror.

Tools

Lets get into the technical stuff by introducing a few tools.

Keyword Difficulty Tools

These two tools are used to give you an automated score on the competitiveness of a keyword. These work great as a general guides. When doing niche research, there is no need to do an in depth study of the top ranked sites. Just throw the keywords into these tools, get a general score and do a brief look at the top 3 sites. This will help you chose good keywords.
The first tool is a free tool provided by SEO Chat. You can also find a keyword difficulty tool at SEOMoz. It is only open to premium members though. I believe it performs a more in-depth check, which makes it more resource intensive. If you join SEOMoz premium, use my affiliate link please.

Sites / Domain Research Tools

These tools perform some general research on domains, which can be used to get a better understanding of your competition.

dnscoop
This site is used to determine the value of a domain. It outputs basic information like PR, Age, Links, and Traffic. This provides a very general assessment of your competition.

spyfu
This can help you spy on your competition. Determine what keywords they’re ranking for and what they spend their advertising dollars on.

Firefox SEO Tools

Here are a few add ons I suggest installing for Firefox.

SEO Quake

SEO for Firefox – I wrote a brief tutorial for this plugin, check out my SEO for Firefox tutorial.

Review SEO Factors

To out rank a site, you need to out perform its SEO factors. I’ve written about them before, but I’ll point out some of the most important ones here.

  • Age
  • Title
  • Header Tags
  • Keyword usage
  • Keyword in first 100 words
  • Link volume
  • Link Anchor Text
  • Link authority
  • Link relevance

We’ll work through these manually, but you might consider signing up for SEOMoz’s SEO Tools, which can return a lot of this information for you.

You’ll want to read my Search Engine Optimization guide (work in progress). It covers the content and design SEO factors. You want your one site content to be optimized better than your competition’s.

Competative Link Analysis

When doing these searches, don’t forget to check both www and non www versions of the domain.

Determine Link Volume

Using Yahoo! Site Explorer
search domain.com

This will return all in links to a domain.

In Link Anchor Text

Use Yahoo Search

linkdomain:domain.com “keywords” – site:domain.com

This will return all links that include the searched keywords. This will help you determine how strong they hold their rankings.

Link Research Using SEOQuake

No need for me to write about this, Mark over at Courtney Tuttle’s blog wrote a great article about how to replicate your competition’s links with seoquake.

Check Out SEOMoz

SEOMoz has some cool tools to help you research your competition, they also have a lot of articles and resources about SEO. I have a membership there myself.

Conclusion

Competitive analysis is about evaluating your competition’s SEO factors. Your goal is to out perfom them by out optimizing them and gathering more related keyword anchored links. The advice in this post is a brief introduction to getting a peak at why they hold their ranking. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I’ll do by best to help.

Post is part of our Search Engine Optimization Guide, that teaches basic SEO

Filed Under Online Success, SEO, SEO Lessons

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