Preparing for semantic search. Whether Google Assistant eventually becomes the ubiquitous tool that Google wants it to be or not. The fact remains that Google wants search to become increasingly more natural and human. It already has in many ways. That means that marketers and website owners need to make some changes to the way they do things. It's no longer enough to find a keyword and repeat it a whole lot.
You now need to work as though you're speaking with an AI. And that means a couple of things. LSI Latent Semantic Indexing. Latent Semantic Indexing is one of the most important things to consider if you're interested in improving your SEO and getting to the top of Google. It's even more critical if you hope to be ready for Google's AI driven future. Not only is that a powerful concept in itself, but it is also an important microcosm of the broader changes that we are seeing to SEO today.
Search Engine Optimization is a big and very important part of digital marketing. And if you want to drive the maximum number of people to your website or blog, then it's absolutely essential. You have the search engines on board. In the past, SEO has largely relied on creating tons of content around a certain topic and repeatedly using a set number of key words or key phrases in that content in order to help Google identify the subject, and help the right visitors to find your pages. Unfortunately, a few people began to take advantage of this system and began keyword stuffing by using the same keywords over and over again to the point of distraction. Google had to get smarter.
And so it did. Today, using the same keyword too much will get you into trouble. So what does Google do instead? It looks at context and the broader subject of the article. In other words, it looks for synonyms and related terms and this also gives it the ability to better understand what your page is about. For instance, if you had written an article about decision trees, then in the past Google could theoretically have gotten confused and brought your site up as a result when someone search for trees.
It may have thought you were talking about decisions about trees. Now though, it can look for related terms like flowchart, and that's helped to more accurately match article to reader. LSI actually comes from mathematics and uses a technique called singular value decomposition. This means that it will scan unstructured data and look for the relationships between the words and concepts within how to handle LSI. So how do you make sure your site is LSI? optimized?
Short answer, you don't. While it is obviously tempting for SEO companies to now start offering their LSI optimize services. The truth is that you should have been doing this all along and without thinking about it. That's what the best web marketers like Andre Ellison have always recommended, and it's what Matt Cutts advises as well. In short, writing naturally should mean that you're including synonyms and related topics. Otherwise, your writing is going to sound pretty repetitive.
The moral is what it's always been stop double guessing and just write for the reader. This is something we'll come back to again and again with regards to preparing for a smarter Google. But there are also some other Tip you can keep in mind if you want to ensure that Google knows what you're talking about. First, make sure that you use more than one search phrase. It's a good idea for a whole host of reasons to use a combination of different search terms, rather than targeting just a single one. Seeing as Google will often show results that don't use the exact key phrase the person searched for, it makes sense to try and include a few popular iterations of the same term.
Likewise, you should make sure to use good and varied vocabulary around the topic. This helps to better demonstrate the context and the subject matter of your article. Rather than filling an article with random synonyms, think instead about words that would often occur alongside the topic you're working with, such as our earlier example of flowcharts. This is called co occurrence, and it's the kind of thing that machine learning algorithms love structured data. The other big concept that SEOs need to consider in order to be ready for the AI Google of the future, is schema markups, also known as structured data. Also known as rich data.
Remember, Google's aim is to enable assistant to answer natural language questions with useful responses, which will draw on information found on the web. Google doesn't just want to pull up a list of useful search results. It wants to be able to answer questions. So if someone asks how to make Bullen, as it will simply read out the ingredients. In order to do this, Google needs to be able to find that most relevant information in a passage of text, and then pull out the specific answer. This takes the concept of rankbrain to the next level, allowing you to understand not just what an article is about, but how each paragraph in that article functions.
The problem is that Google's AI can't quite do this yet, at least not well enough to be able to usefully provide answers for people without occasionally including complete nonsense. That's where schema markups come in. The idea of a schema markup is to essentially annotate your articles and blog posts by telling Google what each bit is and what it does. Essentially, you're saying This is a list of ingredients, or this is a user rating. This also helps Google to provide what are known as rich snippets. Rich Snippets, our search results on the crps search engine result pages that include more than just a meta description.
You might see a search result listed, for instance, that also includes bullet point steps, or that includes ingredients for the meal. This way the user can see the information they're looking for without even needing to leave that website. How to use markups markups look a lot like HTML. Here's an example of what this might look like. That is basically telling Google that you were talking about a local business, the Kindle factory. You can also use skiba to highlight product names, author's aggregate ratings, software applications, restaurants, movies, and much more.
To use this information, you can either look up the HTML code and implement it yourself. Or you can use Google's handy markup helper https colon forward slash forward slash www.google.com forward slash webmasters slash markup hyphen helper forward slash you forward slash zero. Here, you will simply share the URL of the page you want to mark up. And it will then provide you with the opportunity to create the necessary tags. There are also plugins you can use to the same end through WordPress, the good and the bad of schema markups. The savvy among you may have noticed some worrying issues with schema markups.
Specifically, they encourage people not to visit your website. Let's say you have a recipes website, and you included an article on cooking bowl. And as you probably did this, hoping that people would search for it on Google, find your website, and then visit your page in order to read about it. In doing so they might also click on a few ads, they might buy an affiliate product, or they might just remember your brand so they come back again in the future. But if Google simply takes your key information and shares it, then there is no real incentive for them to actually visit your web page. As such, there's no chance that they will click on your ads or buy your products.
They'll not even But know that the information came from your website? Essentially, Google is this one using our intellectual property without any renumeration, which has upset a lot of webmasters, businesses and marketers. So should you avoid using these features all together? Unfortunately, that is not really an option. Remember, Google also uses markups in order to provide rich snippets. These are the more media rich search listings, which include things like star ratings, images, bullet points, and more.
These really help a webpage to stand out in the SRP s, and thereby ensure that more people click on that listing. And while you might not get any benefit from having Google read your ingredients out, if you don't include markup language, then it will just get that same information from one of your competitors. Google wants to use schema markups, and that means that it will likely reward those sites that do with a little SEO boost. for all those reasons. It's essential that you keep using this strategy, even though you might be giving Google free information and doing so in the future. If more and more people talk to their Google Assistant rather than browsing the web for information, then there's a good chance Google might need to rethink its policy.
Less did face a rather big backlash from content creators