Semantic Search and the Future of Search Engines
“Beware lest you lose the substance by grasping at the shadow,” -Aesop
According to Wikipedia “Linguistic semantics is the study of meaning that is used by humans to express themselves through language.” As our entire business is based on language, this is something us search engine folks should be interested in. The search engines certainly are.
Google’s first attempt at utilizing the semantics of keywords and terms in their algorithm came in March of 2009, when they announced that they were going to be using new technology which would allow them to make associations and correlations between words. Bing made a similar attempt at adding semantics by acquiring Powerset which was supposed to add semantic capabilities to their search engine as well.
On top of adding in a semantic analysis portion to their standard rankings, Google also added a ‘related search’ feature. This feature displays other search terms that Google believes to be related and associated to your search, which you can then click on to perform another search on that term. This feature acts sort of like a semantic recommendation engine.
But what affect does this have on SEO strategy? What it means is that it is now important for the text and content on a site to be more diverse and, pardon the cliché term but, more holistic . A website cannot really be targeted for a single term, or a small set of terms anymore. The key is the depth and relatedness of content on the page to the rest of the content on the site. If you have a site about Ketchup, you can’t just focus on the content about the product alone. You also need to include information on recipes, uses, types of foods associated with ketchup, ingredients, the history of the tomato, etc. Then after including this information, you need make sure all of the pages of content are relating back to each other via links.
Having this additional and semantically relevant content on your site will allow the search engines to see your content as being more relevant from both a straight forward keyword relevance perspective, but also from a variety of semantic relevance factors.
However, semantics now goes beyond just word and relevance recognition. With the invention of “rich snippets”, Google is now incorporating semantic results in the actual SERPs listing. Tag a video or a review on your site with a semantic tag and it may show up underneath your listing now.
As far as the future of semantic search goes is hard to say. In the grand scheme of things the concept of semantic search is still very young (Google and Bing have only really been integrating semantics for 1-2 years at this point), however there is no doubt that the semiotics of search will continue to be refined and perfected, and need to be paid attention to. This is especially true when you factor in the recent importance that both Google and Bing have started putting on cues from social media.
On a final note, all three search engines have recently agreed on a standardized language for semantic markup on a website called ‘Microdata.’ On top of this, they have combined forces to come up with www.schema.org, which is a one stop knowledge center on all the how and whys of incorporating Microdata into your sites markup. Needless to say this shows a great deal of interest on the search engines part to continue pushing for structured semantics within their algorithms. Give Microdata a try and leave a comment if you start seeing any changes on your site.
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