Semantic SEO? Is it a new branch of SEO? Do we have to consider one more aspect of SEO before optimising the websites? These questions are natural if you are not aware of Semantic SEO. It is an important on-page SEO technique, which is hard to ignore. Although Semantic SEO as a concept has been there since 2003, it has gained prominence gradually as Google started understanding the search query better in terms of intent, context, and meaning rather than a combination of alphabets.
What is Semantic Search?
Semantic Search, in simple terms, is a process through which Search Engines deliver relevant and meaningful result by understanding the context of the query and intent of the user instead of just matching the pattern of the keyword. Semantic is the study of meaning in language. It can be applied to entire texts or to a single word. For example, “halt” and “stop” technically mean the same, but students of semantics analyse their subtle meaning. With every day, through artificial intelligence, search engines are getting closer to understanding the natural flow of language used by us. It can now correlate the words used and how they work together to understand the meaning behind the words.
Fundamental Shift to Semantic Search
Search Engine companies follows the principle of providing the most relevant information, thereby providing excellent user experience, and Google is no exception to it.
To Tackle this problem, Google came up with several algorithm updates like Panda in 2011 and Hummingbird in 2013, both of which addressed most of the issues of keyword stuffing and unethical tactics for ranking. Hummingbird was a result of more than fifteen years of Data collection and user analysis by Google. It was also a step towards making Googlebot more powerful in looking beyond keywords and moving towards natural language processing, understanding the content and topic covered on the page. This resulted in a dramatic shift in the quality of search results.
Tools that help create Semantic Content
Below are the mentioned Tools which you can use to find the semantically related keywords & phrases to your seed Keyword for creating valuable content
- Google Search & Keyword planner
- Ahrefs
- LSIGraphs.com & LSIKeywords.com
Earlier we never paid much attention to the concept of Semantic SEO. Now that content has started playing a significant role in Search Engine Optimization, Semantic SEO is the need of the hour for creating good content. With Voice Search as the future of Search, we can expect that Semantic SEO is going to be more important than ever.