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NLP - Natural Language Processing to become an evem more important influence to SEO

Guest post by: John Alexander

Article Overview: What is the study of "Semantics?" In general, or in the simplest of terms, "semantics" is the study of "language meaning." It was back in a Vancouver Workshop a few years ago, that we had invited Michael Marshall, an expert on Natural Language Processing to come teach our students on the subject. Few people were discussing this topic back then. But Mr. Marshall had agreed to come speak for us on the topic of how search engines like Google were using NLP.

NLP - Natural Language Processing to become an evem more important influence to SEO

As Michael began to teach the class, Robin Nobles looked across the aisle at me and I glanced back at her as if to say....where in the world does this fellow gather his insights from? Robin already anticipated some exciting things to come because she had known Michael as one of her early online SEO students. I had only just met Michael but was quite impressed with not only the range of detail he presented, but also the way he presented it, as he explained NLP and literally drew mathematical diagrams on the board. He worked away at explaining term vector databases and how artificial intelligence was working within some of the search engines like Google. Of course one of the advantages that Michael has as a communicator, is that he is also an expert in Linguistics and also in Mathematics and. He was able explain and unravel all of the mysteries of LSI on a level that all of our students could understand. But even better yet, he helped teach them simple ways to take advantage of these influences without even needing to be a math expert.
Back then, we had already anticipated some new rifts and changes in importance of this type of influence, since the results of those early tests still defy some peoples reasoning, but for those who were in the know, the knowledge brought us and our Workshop students some significantly wonderful successes.
Let's go back a bit to the beginning.
What is the study of "Semantics?"
In general, or in the simplest of terms, "semantics" is the study of "language meaning."
Here is a quote from Michael Marshall and how he describes "semantics" and specifically
how it applies to LSI on the Web:
"The field of semantics includes the study of how meaning is constructed, interpreted, clarified, obscured, illustrated, simplified, negotiated, contradicted and paraphrased. In other words, one might say how words relate to other
words in order to put the meaning of a message into the correct context.
With respect to LSI, semantics deals with how the various aspects of meaning outlined above, can be found "hidden in documents" by means of the presence, absence, associations and relationships between words found in those documents."
Michael Marshall
Fortune Interactive
One of the most important things to understand is that Latent Symantec Indexing is NOT a replacement for search engine optimization. It is not the latest thing to go chasing after and drop everything else you have learned.
Also remember that it really is nothing new and has been around for a few years. We've been teaching strategies that employ these influences to our Workshop attendees for over 3 years now. But Latent Semantic Indexing along with it's acronym (LSI) certainly has become one of the current industry "buzz words," since many people are just recently learning about its existence, its strengths and the impact it can have on building stability in your rankings. We've also seen instances, where some people are using it as a new "buzz word" but have not really worked with it first hand, to actually test it out, understand it or truly make the best use of it.
We have tested it out and it is still very valid as just one of the advanced SEO strategies that we teach at our workshops today. We have also had many of our research team conduct tests. Our students themselves have also reported great success by employing these strategies that apply a knowledge of LSI into the balance of optimization factors we have taught them.
Traditional Search Engine Marketing
One of the first things you learn about in structured optimization training, is that you must be very focused on a specific keyword phrase that you have already properly researched. LSI though is not so much about your researched keyword phrase, but its much more about the body of surrounding text that gives meaning to the document as whole.
It is true that a human being can scan a page and by simply reading it (with human intelligence) we can read the page and very easily determine what a page is about. However, without applying traditional optimization principles and even though we can understand what a page is about, the page still may not be ranked unless we apply a range of optimization factors. How hard you have to work to achieve those rankings, will depend on how competitive your phrase is.
Results of Early Testing of LSI
Suppose you saw a page with literally no optimization factors being employed. No on-page influences. Literally no off-page factors at all. No "linking strategies" or anything that you are ordinarily accustomed to seeing in traditional optimization practices. In other words no existing "white hat" optimization and no tricky grey area or "black hat" optimization stuff, no cheats, no cloaking or no Spam. And yet suppose such a page was still deemed more relevant for a highly competitive term than literally 148 million other pages, all that were properly optimized.
The question would remain, how could such a page be ranking over multi-millions of competitors for and extremely competitive term? As a human being reads the page of content, of course the content makes logical sense and has value. But how on earth would a search engine possibly "understand" the context of the overall page and give it a top ranking spot over millions of competitors when it is using literally zero optimization practices in place?
Its scary to the point where you would want to wonder how such a page could be honestly out-ranking other pages that are highly optimized, high PR and even have millions of inbound links.
Could it be that a search engine really can "think for itself" and absorb the value of the overall page?
So the question is...
How can a search engine "appear to be able to think?"
Although the LSI algorithm doesn't really understand anything about what the specific words on a page mean (after all a search engine cannot really think), but the patterns it notices through Artificial Intelligence or AI can make it seem extremely intelligent.
At our advanced 3-Day Workshops, we demonstrate to our students just how powerful the LSI influence is by showing them some of our early tests which are still pretty amazing to examine. At the same time, our whole focus is to teach each of our students the full scope of skills and remind them of the importance of building "genuine relevancy" for "useful content" that has true value to a visitor and merits top placement.
Why LSI will continue to become more important in the future.
One of the main reasons that Latent Semantic Indexing will continue to be an important future influence is because LSI is actually rewarding relevancy to documents that are well-written and truly meaningful to a human reader. As I said earlier, a search engine cannot really "think" but it can appear to think. More and more, search engines are beginning to recognize the context of a written message.
Latent semantic indexing actually adds an extra step to the page indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords that a specific page contains (as with traditional SEO), the LSI influence examines the document collection "as a whole" to see which other documents contain some "Semantic similarity."
Human understanding may differ from what a search engine "understands."
Remember that we can not completely base the relationship between different words and synonyms only on what we as "human beings" know. LSI is about what a search engine "understands" through it's entire collection of data. But thanks to AI and LSI at work in the background, the method does correlate surprisingly well with how a human visitor, who is looking at the content, might decide to classify a document collection. In short, it appears pretty intelligent.
Remember that there is a lot more documents being indexed and included in a search engine's database thank just typical Web pages. Think about the huge impact of news stories and other information being published for example on Blogs. Do you think that if a certain public figure or a celebrity was getting a lot of bad press in the news, that that gathered data might not also influence which very specific words might now relate to that persons name, based on a search engines "understanding?"
Great future rewards for professional writers but bad news for Spammers.
This is another reason why many well written articles that are published on the Web do extremely well in the rankings. It's because they are "well written" by writers who are not even worried in the least about what their keyword density, keyword prominence or the rest of the hundred and some odd technical elements that optimizers tend to fret about.
The writer is focused on delivering something meaningful to their readers. This is not to say, that there is no place for the technical aspects of doing good optimization work, because it is still very important. But optimizers need to understand the value and the rewards that go along with creating content they can be proud of. Its no longer just only about optimization in the sense of top rankings, but its about providing fresh, original content that has true value to a reader. The day may come when the first search engine will actually "win the war" on Spam. Whichever search engine that manages to achieve that first, will manage to also become the leading search engine of their day.
The public wants useful, quality information. They want it nicely delivered with speed and minimal fuss. Everyone wants more accuracy in search. Everyone is tired of clicking on unhelpful or useless pages that have no value.
Thanks to LSI and theme based search engines that using a technology that employs Semantics, LSI, and AI, the Webmasters who continue to focus on creating high quality, well written and engaging content, which "reads well" to a human being, will be better rewarded with higher rankings, better visibility and ultimately much more business and sales too.

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Article Tags: latent semantic indexing, Natural Language Processinglsi, NLP



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