Is your Google ranking suffering from outdated SEO?

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Camron Alexander
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1 Is your Google ranking suffering from outdated SEO? If your competitors are using the new semantic methods of search engine optimization, and you are still relying solely on keyword placement and links, you are falling behind. And it's going to get worse. Why has the business press said so little about this revolutionary development? Maybe it's because semantic optimization is harder to explain and harder to achieve than merely placing keywords in certain places on the webpage. Conscientious SEO people always update the sites they work on to reflect recent changes in Google s search algorithms. But this change to semantic search is a major one. And yet few business people are talking about it. Even many of the SEOs that talk to me seem to be concerned only with keywords and site architecture. This gives the advantage to those sites that have been optimized semantically. They will rise in the in the rankings while the conventionally optimized sites will usually fall. For many businesses, not keeping up with this change in technology could be a life or death issue. And for those businesses not yet hurt by the changes, they could be hurt seriously tomorrow. What is semantic search? Semantic search is Google s way of making the internet smarter. The next time you search for something, the Google search engine will know better what you mean than it did before. The results you get will be more useful. From the beginning, Google s main mission has been to tame the internet and help users find what they re looking for. This means trying to weed out spammers, tricksters, and other sites that were irrelevant to the search. Google s newest algorithm, Hummingbird, implemented in 2013, takes a major leap toward this goal.

2 The new search methods figure out the user s intent and deliver those pages that are most appropriate to that intent. Semantic refers to meaning. What doses the searcher mean when she asks a question? What do the words on a particular web page mean? When search was all about keywords, there was a lot of ambiguity. Now there s disambiguation that separates possible meanings and selects the right one. Human language users do this all the time and usually get it right. Google s problem was to teach their approximately 150,000 computers to understand meanings of words in a search query and do this disambiguation. Teaching machines to understand meanings was no easy task. The algorithm uses the context of the words, data from a vast amount of searches, usage in social media, etc. Ideally it customizes the meanings for a particular searcher. The next step is to determine the meanings of the words on the web pages, so the right pages can be delivered to the searcher. To do this, the algorithm once again uses information in its vast database and the help provided by the author of the page through the writing of the copy and the mark-up of the code. When writing web pages, instead of writing for the search engine, authors should write for human users and with their intents in mind. Ask which questions the visitors to the page will want answered. Then answer them. If you do this well, you ll rank high on Google s search results. If not, you won t, no matter what you do with the keywords. For years Google has been telling webmasters to write for their human readers and not for the search engine spider that crawls their site. Readers will really appreciate this, and marketers will get more conversions for qualified prospects. Inbound marketing was wrongly focused on quantity of traffic instead of quality of traffic and the number of conversions that results. In the early days of the web, most sites had visitor counters on the page. Business owners wanted to see those counters spin. Getting a high count was the goal. There s one more thing the page creator can do, and that s using semantic markup. Just as you were always told to use the proper meta tags for headlines, subheads, etc., there s now more markup you should provide the search engine to enable it to discover the meanings of important words on the page.

3 How do you mark up your page for semantic search? You need to add tags to your code. They won t change how your site looks, but they will provide information to search engines on what important words on your page really mean. Then those pages will come up in the right searches as relevant pages. You re already doing some of this now, e.g. the most important idea on the page is wrapped in headline tags. So you put <h1> at the beginning of your main headline. This tells the search engine that this is the main point on the page. Now there are more tags to give more depth to the information supplied to the search engine about the page. How do you do it? Google will help you get started. Go to Structured Data Markup Helper to see an easy-touse tool for adding semantic mark-up to any web page. Another tool you can use is schema.org. Schema.org is an open, collaborative web community that helps webmasters structure their data and mark up their pages to be accessible to major search engines. More than 10 million sites use Schema to mark up their code. Here s an example from Schema.org of what the semantic mark-up looks like and how it makes data on the page understandable to the search engine machines that crawl the web. The standard HTML looked like this: <div> <h1>avatar</h1> <span>director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>science fiction</span> <a href=../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html >Trailer</a> </div>. The semantic mark-up of this code would now look like this: <div itemscope itemtype= > <h1>avatar</h1> <span>director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>science fiction</span> <a href=../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html >Trailer</a> </div>.

4 When the search engine comes across this code, it now knows that the word avatar on this page refers to the movie, not the avatar on a web page, not the avatar in Hinduism, nor any of the other meanings of the word. Try to mark up as much of the content of a page as possible. If you can t do it all, it s OK. You still benefit from greater accessibility even if you only mark up the key elements. Since this can be a time-consuming process, you can start with the most important words of each page and continue the process in stages. How is semantic optimization different from what you have been doing? The main difference is there s greater granularity and depth which results from more detailed mark-up. Standard mark-up identifies headlines, sub-headlines, images, etc. Semantic mark-up refers to many different kinds of entities. Here are some of the common types from Schema.org: Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject Event Organization Person Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant Product, Offer, AggregateOffer Review, AggregateRating. What are the benefits of semantic search for the marketer? It offers better inbound marketing. Too many web marketers focus only on traffic. Put in the right keywords and permutations of keywords and get more traffic. Clients would tell their web designers to be sure to use a lot of keywords and to use them frequently keyword stuffing. Often the copy on the page had so many repetitive keywords it was boring and practically unreadable. In some cases, shady marketers used what are called black hat techniques to drive traffic to their sites, even though much of this traffic was fooled into going there. Don t worry about conversions. It s a numbers game. Bring a lot of people and some of them will buy. The searcher looks for information on Einstein for a college paper and

5 instead gets ads for Viagra, student loans, or mortgages, results not at all relevant or wanted by the searcher. If these scoundrels were good at what they were doing, and many were, relevant results were buried under pages of irrelevant garbage. From the beginning Google has hated these practices that game their system and has been steadily working to eliminate them. In the first courses I took on SEO in the early days of the web, I was taught methods that are now banned as black-hat techniques, practices that will get your site banned. One technique, for example, was to set your major keywords in red type on a red background and repeat them thousands of times. The viewer saw only a patch of red, but the search engine saw these keywords all over on the page and rated the page as relevant to that search. With semantic search those days are almost over. Instead of just looking mindlessly for keywords on pages that match words in a searcher s query, search engines now determine which question the searcher is asking and finds those pages that answer those questions. How do you get started implementing a program of semantic optimization? To prepare your site for semantic search you need to understand how it works and what it s trying to accomplish. You might need to rewrite much of the copy on the site to address and answer the questions of the site visitor. Some of those questions are the reasons the visitor lands on that page. Other questions will arise once on the page. Write your copy to answer those questions rather than structuring your copy to have ideal keyword frequencies and with keywords appearing in the important places even if they didn t belong there, e.g. page titles, headlines, above the fold, etc. You can now even use synonyms! When search was all about matching keywords, synonyms were a killer because they wouldn t count. They didn t match the words in the searcher s query. Then, starting with your most important pages, start adding the new semantic mark-up.

6 How do you find the right SEO people to help with your program? This can be challenging. There are two main problems with SEO people. First they might not earn their money. They don t do the work correctly, following the conventions of good mark-up, or they they re not diligent in doing everything they should be doing. They might also be using outdated practices. The second problem is even worse. To get more work they might be trying too hard to impress you by breaking the rules and trying to game the system. They do this by employing black-hat or gray-hat SEO practices. Some people do this intentionally. Others do it carelessly, because they re not aware of Google s updates. Many practices that are called black-hat today were standard in the past. Sometimes they work. Until you get caught. It s your site that will be penalized by Google and maybe evened banned from their search results. And this could be a disaster for your inbound marketing. Examine SEO candidates carefully, whether they will be working with an outside firm or as employees of your company. Read reviews, background checks, testimonials, references, etc. Finally, ask them what they are going to do to improve the SEO of your site. Ask them about their methods. Do they talk only about keyword placement and site architecture? If pages need to be rewritten, who will do that? If they do the re-writes, will their person be a native speaker of English with an understanding of marketing? A fundamental principle of good management is to separate doing from checking up. You or someone in your organization should assume that role. Examine the code using the resources I mentioned in the sidebar. If you have questions about things that don t look right, bring them up with the SEO professionals. Just asking knowledgeable questions from time to time will by itself result in getting better and more careful service. Which tasks should be done internally or by your web design team? At the very least, your own people should provide a review of all SEO work as mentioned in the last section. But to save money, you can also have your web people add the mark-up to the page themselves, referring to the resources in the sidebar. No special skill is required, since the mark-up if done correctly won t affect the

7 appearance of the page. It s just a matter of adding the new tags. And how to use the tags most appropriately is probably easier for an internal person who understands your content better than an outsider can. What rewards can you expect? Since more of a page s visitors will be more interested in the content of your page, since their questions will be answered on the page, you can expect more conversions and maybe more referrals. You should notice in your website analytics that the bounce rate has gone down as a result of the semantic search directing visitors to the more relevant pages. If you use pay-per-click, such as Google AdWords, you should see higher click-through rates and more conversions, improving the ROI of those ads. John Manning 2016 All rights reserved.

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