A key term that you are going to hear professional web design companies talking about is “semantic SEO.” This is going to revolutionize search engines and could ultimately have a major effect on how your online business ranks in the search engines. Yes, your previous search engine optimization strategies may have you sitting comfortably on page one. With the emergence of semantic SEO you are going to have to change your strategy in order to keep you place on page 1 for specific keywords.
What is Semantic SEO?
So you may be asking yourself what the heck is semantic SEO and what does it mean to me? Well, this is Google’s way of trying to order the web so that it has a coherent flow to it. For example it will show how topics, text, videos, audio, etc. relates to each other. So now onto what this means to you, the online business owner. I am sure as a successful online business owner you understand the importance of SEO and part of your SEO strategy deals with Keywords. Whether it be keyword research or keyword optimization it is ingrained into you to think about SEO as keyword based. This is all about to change. Let me explain, currently if you search for Jaguar for example Google pulls up and scans the web for websites that maybe about a Jaguar based up keywords almost like they are going through a dictionary. Then they will pull up results based upon their best guess for what you are actually looking for. No the term Jaguar can have multiple meanings such as the car or the large cat. Now with Semantic SEO Google will be able to look at the relationship based upon the words you enter in the search engines. Google will look at how they work together in order to determine what it is you may be searching for. Google will now be able to understand that there is a difference between words like where and wear. With Semantic SEO it will now be more about natural language than it will be about keywords.
What Do I Need To Do To Stay Competitive in the Search Engines?
For now Google hasn’t thrown out any of it’s old metrics so you shouldn’t abandon what you are doing if it is working however, it is extremely important that you keep the future in mind and the future is semantic SEO. You may be worrying that search engine optimization is going to go away and you won’t have any control over where you rank. Well this is not the case. In fact I do not believe that search engine optimization will ever go away. It will however continue to change and you will have to be prepared to adapt to whatever changes it may throw your way. Let’s take a look at how you can begin changing up your search engine optimization strategy to stay competitive when semantic SEO goes into full force.
You can start by using semantic markup. I know I know a new term or is it? You may be shocked to learn that semantic markup has been around for a while now but with the new Hummingbird update it really is being pushed into the spotlight. You may recognized the term if I used some of the terms it used to be called in the old days such as Schema Markup or Structured Data Markup. Hopefully those terms ring a bell and take away a little of the stress. All Semantic markup does is help you organize the content on your website in a way that will be easily understood by the search engines.
Now you may be beginning to think that this is going to help you instantly shoot up the rankings to the top of page one where you have been working months to get to and are still on page 2. Unfortunately just like with the old way of doing things this simply is not the case. There is still no way to guarantee rankings or even know how fast you can rank for particular keywords. Don’t get discouraged however because one immediate impact you should notice is that your traffic and conversions will go up and conversions is what it is all about right? You may have noticed some search results lately show some listings with the old way of displaying data and some listings showing an image, a star rating and then the snippet. This is much more appealing and even though it may be 6 or 7 on the list you may choose click on it over websites that are displaying in the top 5 because of how nicely it displays. Oh the power of semantic markup! This is extremely versatile and can be used to markup almost anything on your website.
Tools That Can Help You With Semantic Markup
I understand the thought of learning how to do this can be intimidating especially if your not a web developer. Don’t worry I have listed some tools below that will be a big help to you as you begin to use it.
- Structured Data Markup Helper – This tool is very easy to use and will help you determine what type of semantic markup needs to be added to a specific page on your website.
- Structured Data Testing Tool – This tool allows you test the Semantic markup after it has been implemented to make sure that the code has been updated correctly.
These are 2 great tools that you will want to utilize when beginning to update to semantic markup.
Staying ahead of your competition when it comes to SEO will be a key factor in determining how successful you will be online. Like I had mentioned above it is not necessary at this point to scrap what you are currently doing but beginning to change over to semantic SEO is critical. Like it or not this is the direction that Google is moving and Bing and Yahoo will likely follow suit. Take the steps to be proactive not reactive.