Hello. Following up from last time in this lesson, we'll discuss the differences between search engines of today and their earlier versions. Specifically, in the realm of semantic relationships, you'll learn some of the choices that lead to semantic improvement, both from those seeking to provide accurate results and those seeking to bump their pages up the list by any means necessary. By the end of this lesson, you should have a plan using alternative valid keyword selection to improve the site's ranking and visibility. This lesson we'll introduce you to the concept of topic association and how Google uses topic association to determine relevancy and trustworthiness of content throughout the web. By developing a better understanding of how topic association is used, you can create better-optimized content for your site or for client sites. Google will now look more at contextual meaning of a web page and the content served throughout the site to determine relevancy for a theme or set of topics that your site should rank for. This means that a page should contain keywords relevant to your focus keyword rather than choosing a single focus keyword and repeating it throughout the content several times. For example, let's say the main focus keyword for UCDavis Extension's winemaking course is the keyword winemaking certificate. In this case, using words related to and sometimes synonymous with our focus keyword will help the page be seen as more relevant for the focus keyword or the topic is trying to rank for, in this case, winemaking certification. You can see how your focus keyword can be broken up into various elements. When doing so, ask yourself, what other ways can I describe winemaking or certification, and what other words might be considered relevant to this? What other words support the chosen keyword or topic of the page? If a page is going to be considered useful for readers, it should contain words and phrases that support the overall topic. In this case, you would expect to see words like learn and students within the page as these support the overall theme of a certification program. This will not only improve the page's relevancy for a topic but will also naturally incorporate a variety of what we call long-tail keywords into your copy. Long-tail keywords are longer keywords or phrases that are more difficult to predict but are often very targeted. For example, a long-tail keyword for this page might be, where can I learn how to make wine? This long-tail keyword would naturally be incorporated into the content by including supporting keywords and keywords that are synonymous with winemaking and certification. In order to help determine the theme of a page and the relationship between words, Google improved their algorithm to check for relevancy and semantic relationships. This created more of a holistic approach to SEO and content optimization. Semantic analysis basically looks at how words are related and what the relationship between two words may be. For example, a site about baseball should contain words like pitcher, bat, and run. All of these words might mean something different out of context but together they help support this page's theme of baseball. Amit Singhal an Engineer at Google told an interesting story about how Google learns which words are synonyms. When discussing the creation of this portion of the algorithm, Amit said, "We discovered a very nifty thing early on. People change words in their queries so someone would say 'pictures of dogs and then they'd say 'pictures of puppies' so that told us that maybe dogs and puppies are interchangeable." Amit went on to say, ''We also learned that when you boil water, it's hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance", but there were obstacles. Google's synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot but this means that also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. This problem was fixed in late 2002 by applying theories from a philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. I urge you to read more about Ludwig and his theories at the link I provided in your course materials, Google began to slowly add to its knowledge base of semantic relationships. As Google analyzed the billions of documents and its index, it also analyzed words that were close to each other. Hot dog would be found in searches that also contained bread and mustard in baseball games and not recipes about cooking your dog. We can see this improvement in search today. In the past, if I were to search for hiking spots in the Bay Area, I was likely to get search results like the example provided. Google would first look through its index for sites that contain the phrase I was searching for and if any were found, these would be presented first. Notice how my exact keywords are bolded in the meta-description and the exact keyword is found within the title. As Google's algorithm progressed, less focus was placed on the exact term in the order of the words used. You would start to see results that included words relevant to my query, like hiking in Bay Area, as well as related words like throughout instead of the word in. These words are all bolded as well as words like trails because it is related. After Google's Hummingbird update, such results continued to improve. Now instead of hiking spots, I continue to see bolded keywords like hiking trails. I also get some better local results added in. As Google updates its algorithms and factors in things like personalization, such as location, past search history, and more, search results will continue to evolve and improve. SEO is no longer a one-trick pony. That'll allow anyone to rank a site in the first results through keyword targeting and link building. To be successful, SEOs need to think to the future and focus their efforts on how they can best serve users and keep them engaged. The feature of SEO is about knowing what content a person needs and the best way to deliver that to them. You should now be able to define topic association and explain the importance of using semantically related keywords throughout your content. With this knowledge, you should be able to write or manage the process of creating content that is valuable to both users and search engines.
