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Connecting the DOTS
Written by: Michael MarshallArticle Overview: The importance of using scientific tools in SEO research, rather than 2nd-guessing thoughts disguised as expert tips.
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Free Download - Calculating ROI for SEO By Michael Marshall |
Connecting the DOTS
You may know that Search Engine Watch has a Forums section of its website. One of the most popular threads in the new forum is what I want to discuss because it is very much related to the kinds of SEO software and technology I develop. The title is "Keywords Co-occurrence and Semantic Connectivity" and it has a 5-star rating.
The individual who started the thread goes by the screen name Orion and has a background in Artificial Intelligence, "formal" Science, and Information Retrieval technology. His aim is to persuade SEO professionals of the importance of using scientific tools in their research, rather than 2nd-guessing thoughts disguised as expert tips. I applaud him in that endeavor.
Much of his discussion is very technical in nature but he does a very good job at explaining the technical terms involved. In summary, Orion introduces the forum participants to the notion that some words have a closer semantic relationship to one another than other pairs (or n-tuples) and that this can be ascertained by the degree of their co-occurrence across a large set of documents within a database.
The three recurring questions many have are:
1. whether this information is useful at all to search engine optimization and,
2. whether there is any proof that any form of sophisticated semantic analysis really can make a difference in ranking,
3. do search engines actually make use of such semantic analysis in their algorithms?
A quote I've used is from Google related to the 3rd question: "The award-winning and proprietary Google search technologies are the foundation for AdSense. We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages."
If you've read any of the testimonials of one of my early tools, Theme Master, you'll know that people have seen very helpful boosts in ranking by using its results. So that answers the 1st and 2nd questions at least in a general sense.
The information, instruction, and equations Orion provides are very good at explaining how the semantic closeness/association between words can be measured. You can know, for example, that "dog" and "canine" have a closer relationship than "dog" and "pooch" within a certain subset of a database or search engine.
But how does knowing about this kind of connectivity give you information to improve your ranking? How do we go from this to SEO usable data? What you really need to know is which word associations a search engine prefers when determining the relevancy of documents to a specific query. Which documents and words have the most theme significance is what you need to know. Determining documents of theme significance (D.O.T.S.) is what it's all about. The preferred word associations is the Connectivity that matters. Connecting the DOTS in this way is what will yield SEO actionable information.
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Article Tags: Connectivity, Google, Information Retrieval technology, Keywords Co occurrence, search engine, search engines, semantic analysis, semantic relationship, SEO, SEO
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About the Author: Michael Marshall RSS for Michael's articles - Visit Michael's website  I am also a contributing author to SEOToday.com, the premier website for SEM professionals, and a contributor to "Building Your Business With Google for Dummies" by Brad Hill. I am a frequent presenter at Ultra Advanced SEO Symposiums, a meeting of select masters of the search engine marketing industry, at Search Engine Workshops. I am also a certified instructor at the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Search Engine Academy, an SEO certification program approved by the US educational system. Three SEO Tools I've created: SEM SCOUT - Content Relevance SEO Sniper - Keyphrase Research SEO Recon - SEO Competitive Intelligence Click here to visit Michael's website   The Tao of Search Engine Marketing Dualism in SEO Link Reputation and Your Website SEO Google and Flash Personalization of Search and its implications for SEO Personalization of Search and SEO Lost in the Shuffle |
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