'Semantic Search' a presentation by Emily Hill of Write My Site speaking at Digital Doughnut's September meet-up

Semantic Search

Digital Doughnut30th September 2014

Emily Hill: About Me

@[email protected]/in/emilyjanehill/slideshare.net/EmilyHill1

• Set up Write My Site in 2006:www.writemysite.co.uk

• A lot has changed …

• … but some things have stayed the same

A Brief History of Search

PageRank

Google's rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. When Google was a Stanford research project, it

was nicknamed BackRub because the technology checks backlinks to determine a

site's importance.

Enter SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine's "natural" or un-paid search results.

But wait! Google and SEO were enemies!

But Why?

Because for many years, the Google algorithm was easy to cheat – any rubbish website could position itself at the top of the search listings (a.k.a. “SERPs”) with cheap tricks, known as Black Hat SEO.

Black Hat SEO: Easy as 1,2,3

1. Basic website

2. Keyword stuffing

3. Backlink farming

Pretty Soon, the Internet Was a Mess

Operation Clean-Up

Panda: 2011

• Targeted sites with low quality and/or duplicate content

• Up to 12% of search queries affected

Penguin: 2012

• Targeted sites engaging in link spam

• Around 2.3% of search queries affected

• Designed to build upon the work done by Panda, and list more high quality sites at the top of the SERPs

Hummingbird: 2013

• Heralded the age of semantic search

• Analysed search queries as a collective whole rather than a string of individual words with the aim of understanding user intent

The Dawn of Semantic Search

• Semantics: the study of meaning.• Google is trying to become more

sophisticated. It wants to go beyond the words and phrases people use, to figure out what they mean.

• We’ve got to do more than pepper our content with keywords.

Changing User Habits

• 20% of all searches in 2012 were new (Wired)

• Between November 2012-13, traffic to websites from an ‘organic search’ decreased by 5%, whilst traffic from ‘social referrals’ significantly increased by 111% (Shareaholic)

• Today, 96% of consumers’ time onlineis spent on content sites (Wired)

Schema.org

3 Elements of Semantic Search

1. Predictive search

2. Voice search

3. Image search

1. Predictive Search

ConceptNet5

2. Voice Search

3. Image Search

Types of Content

• Regular “Nice, long articles”• Interviews• Bread and butter web pages• Regular blogs/ news –preferably illustrated

with unique images• Social media conversations*

*Especially Google+

Rehashing: A Warning

Are You On the Knowledge Graph?

No More Games• Modern SEO is about

providing users with answers to their queries.

• It is no longer about returning a load of content which appears to match a keyword but may or may not make any sense in the context of what the user is really asking.

• We can’t “play” Google – we have to co-operate with its goal.

Matt Cutts, Head of Webspam, Google

“Make sure you make a great site, that users love, that they’ll want to tell their friends about,

bookmark, come back to, visit over and over again; all the things that make a site compelling. If that’s

your goal, we’re aligned with that goal, and therefore as long as you’re working hard for users

we’re working hard to show your high quality content to users as well.”

Keywords Still Matter

“Here’s the deal. Google can’t function without keywords … they’re simply the words people type in when they use search engines. It’s the language real people use when looking for stuff.” Brian Clark, Founder of Copyblogger

Clothing for Old People?

Semantic Search Checklist

Learn the language of your customersSort out the techie stuffOrganise your on-site contentClean up your off-site contentGet on Google+Keep publishing nice, long articles!Build a clear, consistent online profile

Emily Hill, CEO, Write My Site

Thanks for listening!@[email protected]/in/emilyjanehill/slideshare.net/EmilyHill1