Semantics concerns the meaning of words – historically a weak area for search engines. Over the years we’ve seen vast improvement in Google’s ability to understand what searchers mean when they enter keywords. You can capitalize on this fact by changing the way you conduct keyword research. Following these tips will also strengthen your website’s content.

Sujan Patel wrote a fascinating article on this topic for Search Engine Journal. After explaining how Google figures out what searchers mean when they enter keywords, he discussed five steps you can take in your keyword research that will help you get found more often by your target audience.

I’m unspeakably grateful that we’re passed the days when optimizing your keywords meant “pick a single target keyword and cram it into your web content as many times as you can,” as Patel characterizes the obsolete style. He correctly notes that “That ship has sailed.” Thanks in part to Google’s Penguin update, the search engine is better at spotting keyword stuffing. But more importantly, Google “understands” words used in context better than it used to.

Patel used the word “fan” as an example. Most searchers don’t use a single keyword anymore; they’ll put in several, which gives Google some kind of context. It knows that “stargate fan site” is not the same thing as “industrial fan review.” Because of this, it can return relevant results to searchers.

But it goes deeper than just returning websites with the specific phrase. Patel notes that “Google and the other search engines use their semantic indexing capabilities to pull results from related SERPs” and deliver the goods. What does this mean? A searcher entering the phrase “industrial fan review” will see results for that phrase, but the search engine might also include results for the phrases “industrial fan comparison,” “industrial fan guide” or “commercial fan review,” among others, to ensure relevance.

Does this mean that your website will show up for related phrases that you haven’t necessarily targeted? Quite possibly, but wouldn’t it be better to target those phrases anyway? Of course it would. The good news is, you can use the search engines’ own semantic indexing behaviors to help you do your research and plan your content around keyword phrases.

We’ll start by building what Patel referred to as “Level 1” core keywords. These are keywords that vary from our target phrase only slightly, without straying far from its meaning. We’ll enlist Google’s help for this task. Just put your key phrase into Google, and wait for the results to display. Then look at the left-hand sidebar; you’ll find a link for “Related searches.” Hit that, and Google will generate a list, complete with links. When Patel tried it for “industrial fan review,” he got 15 slightly different key phrase, including “industrial fan guide,” “”drum fan review,” “industrial fan manual,” and more.

Not all of these may be relevant, so you may want to click through to check any that look a little questionable. One “related search” Google suggested was “industrial fan lyrics;” that key phrase sounds a lot more like it’s related to music than commercial fans! But that caveat aside, the advantage of starting your keyword research this way is that Google recognizes all of these phrases as semantically related; you know it does, because it just said so. Patel notes that this makes them “a powerful starting point for our keyword research.”

Next: Expanding Your Keyword List
 

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In my previous article I talked about four main goals or “personas” you should keep in mind when writing content for your website. Your visitors display a lot more variety than that, though. Four different visitors could have the same goal, but approach it in completely different ways. If you want to sell to all of them, you need to write with their buying personalities in mind.

Once again, I owe a hat tip to Stoney deGeyter for discussing this point. In his article, though, he draws indirectly on a philosophy dating back to Hippocrates. Back in those days, and for a long time afterwards, doctors believed that both illness and one’s personality stemmed from four “humors,” and treatment aimed to balance these humors. While science discredited the medical part of this theory, it turns out the idea of four different basic personalities has some merit.

To be honest, we’re all a little too complicated to be easily broken down into one of four categories. But in trying to build content to encourage a very specific behavior, you can afford to simplify a little. The real challenge comes in creating content that appeals to each buying personality, and is easy for them to find. As you’ll see, they all care about somewhat different things, and something that will turn one personality off will actually help to convince another one to convert.

Let’s start with the first personality. Hippocrates labeled this one choleric. Another term you might use is competitive or goal-oriented. This visitor will want to see all his options before he buys. He does not like inefficiency, and gets annoyed if he can’t bag the “perfect” solution. He will look at your site with one question in mind: will what you have to offer help him achieve his goals?

You may have also heard the term “Type A” used to describe this personality. They’re impatient; they don’t have time to shop around, and they don’t have time for the “BS” of marketing language or other fluff. Quite the opposite, in fact; if you want to earn this buyer’s respect, be honest about any negative aspects of your product or service. In turn, you should respect their time by making your website easy to navigate; they won’t stay for long on a complicated, difficult-to-use website. Why should they? If they can’t easily find what they’re looking for, they’re quite willing to go elsewhere.

The down side of selling to a Type A person, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is he’s not an easy sell. The up side, though, is that once you’ve sold to him, he’s a loyal customer. So put your most trustworthy foot forward, and “demonstrate the true value of your product without over-hyping it,” deGeyter recommends. Make sure your visitor can find all the information they need quickly and easily. Get them to take the next step toward conversion with links and calls to action.

Next: Three Other Buying Personalities
 

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How do your website’s visitors spend their time online? That can vary not only from person to person, but at different times with the same person. Why? Users pursue a variety of different goals. If you keep this in mind, you can write effective content to optimize your site for the most likely goals.

Stoney deGeyter covered this topic recently. He approached it from the perspective of building a mental image of visitor “personas.” You form a persona based on a visitor’s motivation. What do they need? Why are they on your website? Once you can answer those questions, you can think about what kind of content will help your visitors, and create it accordingly.

I don’t disagree with deGeyter, but I like to think more in terms of goals. If you really want to try to think like one of your customers, don’t just ask yourself what they need; ask yourself what they’re trying to accomplish. If your website is set up with analytics that let you track user behavior, you should be able to figure this out. Careful examination of your analytics data may also give you clues as to how your visitors hope to accomplish their goals. Understanding the “how” as well as the “what” and “why” can really assist you in creating content geared to your visitors’ needs.

By the way, you’ll need to accept that your visitors’ goals are THEIR goals, and not necessarily YOURS. Not all or even a majority of visits to your website will end with something you consider a conversion. Your visitor will consider her visit successful if she accomplished her goal – and may come back the next time she needs to do something related to your website’s topic. On that visit, or a subsequent visit, she might well convert (by your definition). If you make it as easy as possible for her to meet her goals, in her way, you’ll encourage her to come back and eventually meet your goals – when your goals and hers complement each other.

So, are your visitors looking to be entertained? Do they want information? How much do they care about getting the latest and greatest thing? Will just about anything do the trick? Why are they on your website? Before your head starts spinning with all of the possible reasons a visitor might have for dropping by, remember that you can help most visitors best by focusing on the basics. “Because there can be dozens, if not hundreds, of reasons a visitor might be coming to your site, it’s easy to get bogged down in trying to develop a persona for every possibility. Don’t get stuck in that trap. With a little work, you can boil everything into a handful of personas that you can use to craft content that meets virtually all of your potential customer’s needs,” deGeyter explains.

Next: Know Why They’re There
 

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You know all the benefits that writing a guest post for a well-read blog in your niche can offer. You know you can write great content because you’re an expert in your field. But how do you get into guest blogging? Let me give you a few clues from the blog editor’s perspective.

I’d like to tip my hat to two people here. The first one is Matt Goffrey. He’s written articles for SEO Chat for the last quarter, and he’s done just about everything a guest poster should do. The second one is Matt Beswick. He wrote a piece for Search Engine Journal on how to cheat at guest posting and get away with it. Some of the tips I’ll be including here I got from his article – but I’ll be talking about them from the other side of the desk.

So let’s assume, for the moment, that you’re an expert in  your field, and you want to find someone – or many someones – who will appreciate that expertise. It’s a little like dating seriously; you’ll looking to build a relationship that will last for a long time and be mutually beneficial. Instead of going to an online dating site, though, you might start by hitting up Google and searching for the keywords “guest post by” or “write for us.” Beswick recommends this. I don’t know if Goffrey did this, but he certainly could have found SEO Chat that way; we do, in fact, have a “Write for us” page that covers the entire Developer Shed network.

Once you’ve collected a list of candidates, forget about sending flowers and chocolate to all of them. If you really wanted to score a date online, you’d study profiles, and that’s what you’re about to do. Go to each site on which you’re thinking of guest posting and read a bunch of entries. You need to read enough posts to get a feeling for the site. Remember that saying about being known by the company you keep – so if you find a site that isn’t posting quality content, cross them off your list. Aim for websites that will appreciate what you have to offer.

After you’ve narrowed down your list, you need to approach each website with your offer to write a guest post. Beswick almost glosses over this as part of the hunt (so totally like a man, right?). As an editor who will receive your offer, however, I see this as a separate step. Focus on each website, and write an individualized letter for each one. Get the name of the editor if you can, and include it in your salutation. Tell her what you like about the website, why you want to write for it, and what value you can add. List your qualifications and include links to examples of your writing.

If the website features a “write for us” page that includes a procedure to follow, follow it. Few things turn on an editor as much as a writer who can follow directions. If that means you need to include a free writing sample, do it. As an editor, I must see what your writing looks like “naked” to know how much time I’ll need to invest in fixing your deathless prose. Matt Goffrey did this, and his sample became his first guest post on SEO Chat. It included our first link back to him.

Next: Good for Them, Good for You
 

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I very nearly titled this article “The Truth About Keywords in Title Tags.” I didn’t because I’m no longer sure that anyone has all of it. If you’re ready to rethink one of the most basic things you’ve ever learned about SEO, and stop simply reacting to Google, keep reading.

First, let me give credit where it’s due. I just finished reading a post by Michael Martinez in which he digs more deeply into this so-called basic topic than anyone I’ve seen. Martinez’s contrarian views, eloquently expressed and supported, can make any reader rethink a cherished position. If he’s right, then the way most of us do our page titles or title tags is – well, not wrong, exactly, but a little misguided.

We all know how you’re supposed to write title tags, right? Start by doing some keyword research for your topic, build a title using those keywords, then lather, rinse, repeat. Make sure you repeat those keywords at appropriate intervals throughout your article. Voila! Your keyword magic will get you a spot in the SERPs, right where searchers can find you.

Martinez questions this approach – even as he blatantly uses it in the very same post. He titled his entry “How to Write Title Tags for SEO” and uses that phrase periodically throughout the piece. Clearly, this classic technique delivers traffic and rankings. Martinez does not say that it doesn’t work; rather, he maintains that it’s too basic.

“Real search engine optimization doesn’t care about a SINGLE keyword,” Martinez explains. Your page of content should rank first for far more keywords than you can fit in the title tag. If you can only get to the first page of Google for one to three expressions, according to Martinez, your SEO sucks.

Martinez wants us, as SEOs, to use our imaginations a lot more than we do when we’re simply trying to optimize page titles and links. “If you’re sitting there bored to tears because all your boss wants you to do is put his favorite keywords in your page titles, you can slip one past him by optimizing those same pages for other keywords AT THE SAME TIME,” he all but whispers conspiratorially.

He then invites us to join in on the conspiracy by writing posts on our blogs with titles that start with “What I Think About…” or even “If I May Intrude On Your Thoughts For a Moment…” and then add the topic at the end. If you’re hardcore enough to actually try this, he also wants you to not check your keyword tools before adding that topic. Some will see no reason to try this scary, seemingly pointless exercise. Why not stick with winning titles like “How To…” and “Ten Ways to…” and so on? Come on, Martinez does that right in the article in which he preaches rebellion! Why should we do it if he doesn’t?

Next: How to Stand Out in a Crowd
 

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Early last week, Google began using a new algorithm to help it combat webspam from black hat SEOs. Dubbed Penguin, it aims to eliminate from the search engine’s listings websites that engage in certain shady practices. But how well does it work?

Google webspam guru Matt Cutts explained the rationale behind Penguin in a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog. He noted that “We see all sorts of webspam techniques every day, from keyword stuffing to link schemes that attempt to propel sites higher in rankings.” Penguin “represents another improvement in our efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.” It’s supposed to decrease the rankings of sites that violate Google’s terms of service.

Cutts gave two examples of websites whose ranks he expected to see drop after Penguin. One displayed egregious keyword stuffing. The crime committed by the other site seemed a little more subtle, until you tried to read its text. It showed a poorly-written piece about exercise, with links about loans randomly scattered throughout the text. The text of the article clearly did not relate at all to the links.

The Penguin algorithm, though going live for all languages at the same time, was expected to have less of an impact than Panda. Cutts noted that Panda’s initial version affected about 12 percent of all queries to some degree; Penguin was supposed to affect only a little over three percent of all English queries. In languages with more heavily-spammed sites, Cutts wrote, Penguin could be expected to affect more queries – five percent of Polish queries, for example.

If you’ve been doing SEO for a few years, you’re probably scratching your head right now. Granted, this is just one of a number of techniques Penguin is penalizing, but really – keyword stuffing? That practice is so old, it predates Google, and no good SEO does it anymore! Is Google only now going after these black hat approaches? As Danny Sullivan observed, “It’s not, even though the blog post might give some newcomers that impression…Rather, what’s really happening is that Google is rolling out better ways that it hopes to detect such abuses.”

One reason Google hopes to do better at fighting this kind of webspam is that, unfortunately, it’s not hard to find websites for which it still works. This discourages white hat SEOs from building the kinds of great websites that Google wants searchers to find. Why go to all the work of building an excellent website (so the thinking goes) when some other site can outrank you just by spending a few hours and a little money on techniques that break Google’s Terms of Service?

In fact, Google seems to have finally gotten the message that SEO is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. If you read Cutts’s blog post, he very clearly describes – and encourages — all the good things that white hat SEOs do for websites. These blessings include making it more crawlable, translating “jargon” into words that normal searchers would use, improving usability, creating great content, improving speed, and so on. It’s not the first time that Google has endorsed white hat SEO, but since it sometimes seems as if the search engine is at war with SEOs in general (as opposed to black hat SEOs in particular), it’s good to see it in black and white.

Next: How Well Does Penguin Work?
 

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Could Facebook’s cash machine be slowing down? That’s one possible conclusion observers can draw from the paperwork the company recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. While it’s not likely to slow down investors, it’s not the best news to get so close to the social media giant’s IPO.

According to a quick item from David Angotti for Search Engine Land, Facebook reported that its net income fell 12 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Looking at the previous quarter’s total revenues, the latest quarter saw total revenues fall six percent, to $1.06 billion. That may not be cause for serious concern, however – especially when you consider that the previous quarter included the holiday shopping season, and Facebook makes its money from ads. Indeed, the company itself noted that the downturn was due to “seasonal trends.” Compare Facebook’s revenues to the year-ago quarter, and you see growth of 45 percent.

While those numbers should hearten investors, digging a little deeper reveals some cause for concern. As Angotti noted, “acquisition and operating expenses are rapidly rising.” Some of that can be attributed to the explosive growth in Facebook’s membership. The L.A. Times reported that Facebook is up to 901 million monthly active users as of the end of March. That represents more than 50 million new users in just three months.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but that many new users means Facebook needs to keep building on its infrastructure to make it scale properly: new machines, new software, and more skilled employees, in both technical and non-technical areas, to keep everything running smoothly. In fact, operating expenses have risen enough to make accountants put out whatever may be left of their hair after this tax season. Looking at the year-over-year figures, operating costs went from $343 million for the first quarter of 2011 to $677 million last quarter. That’s nearly double the expenses in just one short year!

But these aren’t the only new expenses facing the social media site. Last year, Facebook’s total acquisition costs came in at $68 million. Just this quarter, the company agreed to purchase Instagram, a relatively new but wildly popular photo sharing app, for $1 billion ($300 million in cash plus 23 million shares of stock). Facebook also spent $550 million acquiring rights to a patent portfolio from Microsoft. Observers expect the company to use these patents to help defend itself from a Yahoo lawsuit.

The messy legal situation could complicate matters. As the Wall Street Journal explains, Yahoo accused Facebook last month of violating 10 Yahoo patents covering online advertising and communications. The patents Facebook bought from Microsoft, according to WSJ’s unnamed source, “relate to fundamental Internet technologies, including email, instant messaging, Web browsing, Web search, online advertising, mobile technology and e-commerce.” In addition to the patents purchased from Microsoft (which the software giant originally got from AOL), Facebook has also recently bought 750 patents from IBM, and gone on the attack by countersuing Yahoo.

Next: Should Potential Facebook Investors Worry?
 

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