|
The influence of semantic indexing on your search
engine rankings
Semantic indexing is getting more and more important to
search engines. What exactly is semantic indexing and how
does it influence your search engine rankings?
What is semantic indexing?
Semantic indexing means that search engines try to associate
certain terms with concepts when indexing web pages. For
example, Paris and Hilton are associated
with a woman instead of a city and a hotel, Tiger and Woods are
associated with golf.
How can search engines find the relation between
words?
For example, Google has billions of web pages in its index.
If Google finds that many web pages contain both the word
Paris and the word Hilton then Google might assume that
these keywords are related. The other words on these pages
could give Google a hint that this special word combination
is about a woman.
Words that frequently appear very close to each other
could get a tighter connection. Google has a lot of algorithms
that allow them to calculate the relation between different
words.
How does this influence your search engine optimization
activities?
If you want to succeed on Google then it is important
that you show Google that your website is relevant to your
topic. Here are some things that you can do to show search
engines that your site is relevant:
- Use a meaningful site architecture
Use a logical system to organize your website content.
Create content sections that deal with different parts
of your main topic and make sure that everything that is
related to your topic is mentioned on your web pages.
Make sure that your web pages are put in the right categories
on your website and that it's easy to find the different
categories.
- Use web pages that use different relevant search
terms
If you're targeting the search term "used cars" you should
also create pages that are relevant to "auto", "suv", etc.
- Get links from pages that are semantically relevant
to yours
If you're selling cars then the "Cars" web page that
links to your site should not be about the movie. Links
from topically related pages will be semantically beneficial
to your site.
- Find out why other pages rank higher than yours
If you ever asked yourself why another page has been ranked
higher than yours although you perfectly optimized your
pages for your search terms then you should analyze
the inbound links of the top ranked pages.
The number and the authority of inbound links are important.
However, it's also important that the links come from semantically
and topically related pages.
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
optimized 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.
|
