An SEO Exercise in Semantics

Today, most corporate sites have evolved to become a vital, comprehensive, digital asset that functions as the central contact point for all audiences—researchers, potential customers, existing customers, vendors, resellers, affiliates, competitors, employees, management, press and global partners. As such, making an organization’s Web presence appealing for today’s search engines is a much more daunting task than even a few years ago.

To do so, companies need to conduct an exercise in semantics. The language and words used to identify a company’s brand are being collected and evaluated by the Googles of the world, who now seek to index and rank corporate sites based in large part on the availability and context of dynamic content, such as videos, podcasts, images, products and blogs. Optimizing these assets for new and existing customers is critical path for 2009.
Companies that have already performed semantic word maps and content gap analyses are likely being properly represented to potential customers, who love their brand and consistently convert to potential buyers at higher than average rates. Organizations that fail to understand how search engines redistribute their company’s information and presents the firm to the world will fail to generate adequate returns for their SEO investment – often times without fully understanding why.

Where to Begin
Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers over a dozen semantic-related optimization best practices, and recommend techniques like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, etc. for Webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all types and sizes. The guide includes many illustrations, pitfalls and resource links.

In addition, there are several other steps that companies can take today to improve their SEO rankings:

Step # 1- Deciding what semantic word mapping tools to use
The numbers of options are numerous, but here are the five most popular:

• Google Keyword Research Tool (Beta)
• Microsoft adCenter add-in Beta for Excel 2007 (requires adCenter member account)
• Wordtracker (subscription based)
• OptiRanker (subscription based)
• Keyword Discovery Tool (subscription based)

In getting started with SEO, organizations would be well served to filter their total list down to the top 75-100 keywords at first.

Step # 2 – Deciding which words to use
This process should be guided by relevance, popularity and competitiveness.

Relevance: Organizations should consider whether the keyword is 100 percent relevant to their business, products, services and the content on its Web site, and if they have the content and specific web page/s to support each keyword under consideration.

Popularity: Companies should determine what are the numbers of searches being performed for each relevant keyword and are there other variations of the keyword that are searched more often.

Competitiveness: Organizations should also make a best guess determination if the keyword under consideration would be next to impossible to get on the first page of the organic search results, depending on how widely it’s used by competitors. Instead, there may be close variations of the keyword that can be leveraged for a quick-win.

Step # 3 – Group Keywords by Theme
Once companies narrow down their list, it’s time to map them by grouping all keywords by theme. The idea is to select one primary keyword along with four or five supporting keywords. Keep in mind, these groups of keywords will eventually be assigned to one landing page that includes all of these keywords in its content.

Art and Science Combined
While the exercise in semantics may appear trivial at first glance, in fact, it can be one of the more critical tasks an organization can conduct to increase its organic search rankings. What’s more, companies must continually invest in refining their approach; the exponential evolution of search engine technology demands it. Think of it in the same manner as any other marketing program; because that’s exactly how SEO should be performed.

Paul J. Bruemmer is director of search marketing at Red Door Interactive.