SEO: The Semantic Structure – A new approach for webpage evaluation

Note: This article is a part of the collection titled content marketing in less than 300 steps!

The keyword intensive article writing has been a classic black-hat technique for SEO in the last decade.

For years, SEO technicians recommended their clients to repeat their target keyword as much as possible in their article.

So if I wanted to have an article about content marketing in the first SERPs, I had to consider so many occurrences of the term content marketing in my article.

This is an example:

Content marketing is the most popular approach in the current marketing era. Of course there are other approaches beside content marketing but still many experts believe that content marketing is the most effective approach. If you want to get acquainted with content marketing and use content marketing to…

The measure of keyword density appeared as one of the key success factors of the pages in SEO.

After a couple of updates in Google search algorithm, articles with high-density keywords got penalized and marked as SEO black-hat.

Soon, SEO experts learned to consider an upper-bound to keyword density and recommended the authors to bound keyword density between a lower and upper range (typically 1.5% and 3-4%).

Nowadays, everyone knows that keyword density is not a single best indicator of the relevance anymore. Even it can not be a reliable predictive indicator!

Although Google is getting closer to an automated learning machine and is not going to work on explicit search algorithms as before, still there are some clues to find the substitute for the old-fashioned keyword-rich SEO approach.

Semantic Structure Analysis is the new approach to evaluating the articles and LSI (Latent Semantic Index) seems to be one of the ruling indexes of the current article evaluation.

Besides so many mathematical calculations and extraction of eigenvalues and eigenvectors, let me describe the LSI function in a very easy way:

Consider two different articles both with Apple in the title and 5% density of Apple keyword in the body. How can we recognize that which one is about the famous mobile phone producer and which one is talking about the well-known fruit?

It’s so easy. Take a look at the other words in the article. If there are other tech-related words (e.g., phone, connectivity, screen, touch, etc.) you can categorize it as a technical article. But, if you find many other health-related words such as taste and poison and digestion, it’s more likely that we are reading an article about fruit!

The same idea can be applied to measuring and comparing the relevance of the two articles on the same topic.

In a real article about content marketing, it’s more likely to see other content marketing terms beside the main canonical term. Somewhere there must be a notion of content strategy. Somewhere else you should be able to see something about content type and so on.

It would be easier to understand the concept if you check the following address. There are many other options available on the web for the same purpose.