If you’ve been paying attention to the news in the tech world lately, you may have heard of something called semantic search and how it’s poised to revolutionize the way we search online. But what is semantic search, exactly?
And why should you care? You’re about to find out! But first, let’s discuss the pros and cons of Google search and traditional keyword searching since both these methods are an important context for understanding semantic search.
The Importance of Rich Data
In today’s digital age, the importance of data has never been more apparent. Data is everything – it’s your lifeline in an ever-changing world.
The internet, which I’ll simplify as anything related to online activity, is a perfect example of how data fuels progress.
For example, imagine you were walking down the street one day and came across a coffee shop you hadn’t seen before; it would be difficult to know whether or not it was any good without first viewing some sort of rating system on the place.
Sure, this sounds logical – but that’s exactly what sites like Yelp do! Ratings are indicative of customer feedback, which inevitably feeds into search engine optimization agencies.
Understanding the Challenges Faced by Today’s Search Engines
Today’s search engines have a difficult job. They have to sort through billions of pieces of information scattered across the web.
These days, a single sentence can contain keywords from completely different topics, making it hard to pinpoint what that sentence is about.
The success of any search engine rests on its ability to index all the pages that match a specific query, correctly returning results based on the user’s preferences and expectations, taking into account geo-location data and personalization algorithms.
Introducing RDF
In this blog post, we will explore Semantic search and the different levels of detail it can provide to users on a search engine.
We will also discuss how semantic search can be used to help marketers fine-tune their SEO services in Canada tactics. RDF (or Resource Description Framework) provides additional information that connects digital data, which improves what we know about content and its relevancy to the user’s query.
To help demonstrate the benefits of semantic search, we will look at two examples of how an individual might use them with an eCommerce retailer.
The Rise of Structured Data Markup
Structured data markup has been around since 2005, but it is still on the rise. Major search engines including Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all implementing structured data markup (aka schema) tags as a new way to enhance search engine results pages. And why should you care if your site has it?
Structured data helps create rich snippets – summaries of specific webpages that pop up in SERPs when a searcher looks up a keyword or phrase. This gives users more information about the page before they click through to get there – which helps increase conversion rates.
Linking Data with Links
One of the best things that search engines do is that they read content, understand the context and meaning of what’s written, and then rank accordingly.
But with all the new ways to consume information (images, videos), how does a search engine rank results? The answer is a semantic search which is an extension of natural language processing.
Semantic technology allows machines to understand not just words but their true meaning, making it easier for computers to find what people are looking for.
Semantic Search Beyond Google SERPs
Did you know that Google SERPs is only 10% of the story in search engine optimization (SEO)? When it comes to setting up a new site, writing optimized content, or building links to your pages, the first step is getting on the radar of web crawlers that do not rely on keywords.
Otherwise known as semantic search engines like Blekko or DuckDuckGo, they may be hard to compete with but they are a whole other arena that you need to dominate if you want your site to rank high in organic searches.
While these sites don’t typically provide actual tangible ranking signals for themselves – such as PageRank – their inclusion can be invaluable for achieving rankings on Google’s SERPs.