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Today we are talking about semantic SEO. But first, a little history. A few years ago, positioning a website was relatively easy. Things like putting in keywords and parroting them all over the content worked. The meta keywords tags worked, in which everything entered to attract traffic, although later, the web had nothing to do with those keywords. In short, in many cases, the experience in the search was not the best.
Today, those techniques used years ago do not work, but they can cause you a penalty from Google. The obsession of the search engine is that when someone performs a search, they reach the best possible result, so they must continually improve their algorithm to achieve it. Currently, it would help if you worked SEO positioning in a radically different way. And semantic SEO has a fundamental role in it.
What is Semantic SEO
Google solved all the problems that I told you initially with its update Hummingbird or colibrí, an algorithm that deals with analyzing the text as a whole and understanding the subject and the relationship between the terms in the content. Understanding and interpreting the text as precisely as possible to offer you exactly the result you are looking for.
As you can see in the previous image, semantics is the part of linguistics that deals with studying the meaning of linguistic expressions. This logically has capital importance when writing your texts. Instead of repeating the exact keywords continuously throughout your post or page, you should now use synonyms, related concepts and use the entire semantic arc of the topic you are dealing with.
In short, semantic SEO allows you to unequivocally identify the topic your text deals with, improve its quality and reduce keyword stuffing, better known as putting 50 keywords throughout the text repeating like a parrot.
Examples of semantic SEO
To see everything more clearly, I will give you an example. What am I referring to if I say the word niche to you? It can be a niche market or a funeral niche. The context and the rest of the terms that I use in my text will allow you to identify without a doubt which of them I am referring to. If I speak of market, target, segment, product, I refer to the market niche. If I talk of corpse, burial, death… then there is no doubt that I refer to the funerary place. The wider the semantic arc of the text, the better.
Another example. Take a look at the search result “who is the president of the United States” :
Google has no doubts about the result, obviously, but notice that the United States / President appears above; that is, Google understands the relationship between these two entities ( what are entities in SEO ). But not only between those two, but all the people that appear below are also entities that in some way relate to Joe Biden, who is the president of the United States, which is just what you have looked for.
If in your text about Joe Biden you do not talk about all those relationships, concepts and terms that Google understands that surround that entity, it will cost you much more work to the position.
How to optimize semantic SEO
I’m going to give you some keys to optimize the semantic SEO of your site.
Use structured data markup
Structured data markup is a way to organize easily actionable and understandable information to search engines. You can see more details on schema.org and test if your site has them on this page.
Work your content well
As I have already told you before, preparing a rich text that includes the maximum number of synonyms and terms related to the subject you are talking about is essential for optimizing semantic SEO.
Link Building for semantic SEO
You can’t forget about all this semantic SEO when getting links for your site. Not only is the anchor text important, that is, the fragment of text that can be clicked to get to your site, but the text that surrounds that anchor is also significant. This is known as a co-occurrence.
As you can see, SEO is a broad and complex discipline. Search engines are increasingly sophisticated, and you have to understand well how they work and what they are based on when classifying results. If you want to know if your website is in optimal conditions to position, you can hire a professional SEO audit through which you will receive a complete report on the status of your website.
Also Read: Top 3 Most Influential SEO Metrics
