My name’s David James and I’ve just started a new job here at Click Consult. I’ve always loved SEO and it’s always been a hobby but now I earn a living from it as an SEO programmer, how lucky is that. Actually luck had nothing to do with it, it was the keywords I placed in my CV that got my online CV noticed – SEO got me a job doing SEO.  This is my first blog post for Click Consult so I hope you find something in my contribution useful.  Please leave feedback too!

“What’s the next biggest thing in Search Engine Design?” I often ponder.  Since PageRank was described in their thesis by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page 15 odd years ago, there really haven’t been any ground breaking advancements in the algorithmic design of search engines.  The search engines have no doubt become smarter, and I would guess smarter in the sense that they use semantic reasoning to some extent in their algorithms.

As we know keyword stuffing sets Google’s spam alarms ringing and that’s asking for penalisation in one way or another.  Keyword stuffing is definitely not a natural form of writing and that’s why it sets off the alarm bells.  Writing using synonyms is natural as we as humans have 100’s of different ways to verbally achieve the same thing.  Google likes this and tries to understand it too.

It’s a good idea to write web pages content that reads as naturally as possible using synonyms.  So what kinds of synonyms are best?  We could use a thesaurus to identify related words, but Google already keeps its own index of words it views as related.  We can find these out using: ~ the tilde operator and incorporate them into our web documents.

As an example, let’s say we’re writing some content for a website about the army.  Looking for semantically related keywords to use, as Google views, we perform the search ~army.  This comes back with the following related keywords: armed forces, war, defence, soldier, military.  These are all unquestionably related to the army and as this is what Google thinks, we should incorporate them into our content.

We can also take things several steps deeper and perform semantic searches on the keywords Google finds related such as ~war which returns: Vietnam, military, battle, WW2, wars.  These may or may not be worth considering, you’d probably have to use common sense, something that Google doesn’t have but makes an excellent attempt (indirectly) at figuring out what words are related.

I believe that semantic is certainly the way forward with search engine design and that the search engines will only get better at it.  We should be writing content naturally anyway but as SEO practitioners we might as well use the tools provided by the search engines themselves to write search engine friendly websites too.

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