Relevancy in Context

Relevancy in Context

Peter Hatherley ahead of the curve.

Search engines are constantly evolving and with the implementation of RankBrain relevant material presented in a clear manner is key to recognition and search results.

Time to retrain your brain to think about what is inside each piece of content you produce.

Google isn't going to openly tell you what the relevant ingredients are in your particular niche (nor is anyone else ) they've just levelled the playing field for everyone. Now you need to search out that relevancy for yourself especially if you want to produce higher quality content than your competitors.

#seofornow   #searchengineoptimization   #contentoptimization  
#seo   #relevancy   #contentcreation  

Originally shared by Peter Hatherley

Ranking or Relevancy?
The landscape of SEO has changed. Yet in a way the more things change the more they stay the same.

The current SEO industry was built on the foundation of page ranking so it's having a bit of an identity crisis with itself right now. Our clients have been spoon-fed on high rankings, keyword density and getting tons of back links, so weaning them off it isn't as easy as it seems.

Yet relevance was the holy grail of the SEO industry prior to the dark years of highly-suspect SEO techniques (that were intended to game the system) such as article spinning, back link farming and keyword stuffing. This false economy saw many companies riding on the top of the SERPs without having that appropriate relevancy but their short lived ascendancy was really just a pack of cards waiting to collapse.

So the ones who had committed themselves to relevancy, strong back links and high quality markup found themselves where they should have been in the first place.

So in a way things have stayed the same because that's how it was at the beginning. The heady days of compelling innovative content that naturally found its way to the the top of the pile.

So #semantics  isn't a new thing at all. It's been a strong theme ever since the early days of the internet and before Google rode into town with their page rank algorithms it was the main way search engines worked. It was that foundational element that emerged from behind the shadows after the black-hat brigade was sent packing by a few penguins and pandas.

Then the Hummingbird update came along riding on the coattails of the unveiling of the Google #knowledgegraph  and we suddenly found out that Google had been covert semantic agents  all along, just as David Amerland and other semantic experts revealed around that time.

In fact they'd been compiling a huge resource based on everything ever searched for on their search engine (in absolutely every language known to mankind). They even went as far as announcing this 3.5 billion object #bigdata  semantic resource and the smart ones listened and the others said it's just a fad.

For me it was more a case of unveiling the details of what was under the hood rather than something new like a start up venture. It explained everything like a key in a lock. The dots were there if you were willing to take a look at the hints. It was like .. Look .. this is what we've really been up to for the past few years. In my view it was one the most transparent moments in Google's history.

Relevancy is all about H2H (human to human) interaction. It's about people and talking to real people, helping real people and being totally transparent and virtually hypeless. The difference now is that Google's AI generally comprehends what we're really saying now and the good news is that it can only get better.

So now content relevancy rules the roost in the SEO world. This semantic authority will undoubtedly lead you to higher rankings yet that is really only a side effect of the increased relevancy. Undoubtedly the need to develop strong back links, analytic funnels, and high quality markup continue to be major foundational elements in any optimisation

But if we put the cart before the horse and chase ranking without pursuing relevancy we'll fall far short of the mark in this current climate. It's this simple. Gaming the system just isn't worth it.

Google isn't going to openly tell you what the relevant ingredients are in your particular niche (nor is anyone else ) they've just levelled the playing field for everyone. Now you need to search out that relevancy for yourself especially if you want to produce higher quality content than your competitors. 

Relevancy in these heady-days of Google's "Deep Learning" stage means mirroring those relevant objects that are connected to your industry or service.

Some do this quite naturally (as we've observed in our testing) but having direct access to relevant wording, such as found within our Latent Semantic Themesets (and associated Semantic Research Tools) will undoubtedly give any web content developer an instant edge in developing both relevancy and authority within their content.

#semantics   #seo   #H2H   #searchoptimization   #semanticoptimization      #semanticsearch   #semanticweb   #lingualmatching   #linguistics #latentsemantics   #ranking   #seotips   #semtips   #authority   #authoritymarketing   #authoritycontent