A recent announcement by Google highlights the search engine’s improved ability to understand words and how they relate to each other. By highlighting synonyms in its search results, Google is showing that it can figure out much more about the context of page content.
Google’s improved linguistic and semantic skills may be a double edged sword for people who use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques for their rankings. On the plus side, people who try to write content as naturally as possible will have already included common synonyms in their website text. On the other hand, people who rely too heavily on a certain set of keywords, without using synonyms, may find themselves sliding in the rankings as Google further refines how it indexes synonymous terms.
An example of synonym highlighting can be found in our own industry. When you type in “search engine optimization” into Google, you may notice that the acronym “SEO” is also highlighted. Even though you get very different results when you search on these terms individually, the search engine’s understanding of the relationship between these terms is an indicator that Google thinks they are one and the same, and believes that a user would be helped by the bold text.
For webmasters who may have neglected their content, or who based all their text, titles, descriptions, and keywords on a narrow range of phrases, it may be time to invest in SEO improvements. Even though the meta description tag doesn’t improve rankings, the highlighting of synonyms does improve visibility and click-throughs, so an audit of past SEO work may be in order. If your keyword research is more than 2 years old, it would be a good time to use a tool like Google’s keyword tool to look for related terms, and see if your SEO is still current.
Additionally, it is always important to keep current with search trends as they relate to customers. People have become savvier about their word choices when they type their queries into search engines, and a new course of keyword research may enable a flexible website owner to jump ahead of sites that haven’t altered their tags or content in some time. If you find that your website’s text is not congruent with the word order or keyword choices used by the average consumer, then some polishing and rewriting may help create the freshness that a search engine wants to present on its results pages.
The use of synonyms should also extend across anchor text for links, both on and off the website. If you’re soliciting links from other sites, you should make sure that popular synonyms are in the link text, but you should also ensure that the same synonyms are on the landing page. At this time, it may still make sense to create additional pages based around synonyms rather that mixing up synonymous terms on a different page. In the future, synonyms may be indexed in relation to their semantic counterparts, but right now there is still plenty of value in having exact matches on your site.
Google’s semantic search engine improvements underscore one of the tenets of good SEO, which involves making your site into the best possible resource for its subject matter. As search engine algorithms become better able to understand language, they will use their knowledge of words and concepts to pick the best possible sources of information online. Therefore, anyone seeking to have (or continue to have) a profitable web presence vis a vis search engine rankings should definitely consider the power of language as algorithms approach a human level of knowledge.
Tags: synonyms
