Mediarun Search Marketing News

Semantics is 'vitally important for SEO'

April 27th 2010

Search Engine Optimisation News

Without professional help from a search engine marketing company, successful SEO campaigns can be difficult to pull off.

As competition for keywords and related terms gets more intense and search engines increase the complexity of their algorithms, there are more and more things that marketers have to take into consideration when implementing search engine optimisation campaigns.

Now, not many marketing professionals are linguists, but having a good grip on semantics (how words are related to each other) is fast becoming one of the more important aspects of SEO. Fortunately there are a number of tools out there which make investigating the words associated with a company's products and SEO keywords that much easier.

But why is semantics important? Well all major search engines use latent semantic indexing (LSI) when crawling companies' websites.

Essentially they club together related words and use the overall picture to assess what each web page says and who it is aimed at - which ultimately impacts on a site's placement on search engine results pages.

This means that if words that search engines know are related appear next to each other on a company's webpages, crawlers will make a number of assumptions about the site. This means that it is vitally important to have an extensive list of interlinked keywords that are used throughout a company's search engine marketing strategy as it will boost SEO results.

Commenting on how to take advantage of latent semantic indexing, industry expert Andre Voget and Johannes Selbach told Free SEO News: "Don't focus on a single keyword when optimizing your pages.

"If you want to prepare your website for advanced search engine algorithms then you have to create a website that has been optimised for many different but related search terms.

"In addition, it's important that the links to your website come from topically related pages so that search engines put your website in the right context," they added.

Earlier this month, Yahoo published its SEO (search engine optimisation) stylebook. It has worked on the almanac for the past 15 years and hopes that the book will take SEO back to basics.

To find out about the performance solution we can offer you and your business, speak to one of our consultants on 0207 843 2265 or contact us.