How Google is Reading and Ranking Content in 2016

1. Link Building

2. Crawlability

3. Content

What do you think of when you hear SEO:

Just Do Some Keyword Research...

Make Pages For Each Keyword...

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Keyword Research was a cornerstone to getting content ranked.

You Knew It…

… But So Did Your Competitors

(Yes, that means SEO takes longer these days!)

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https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

Hummingbird Update — August 20, 2013

Contextual search is a form of optimizing web-based search results based on context provided by the user and the computer being used to enter the query. Contextual search services differ from current search engines based on traditional information retrieval that return lists of documents based on their relevance to the query. Rather, contextual search attempts to increase the precision of results based on how valuable they are to individual users.

Conversational search is a new kind of philosophy for human/computer interaction. The principle behind conversational search is that a user can speak a sentence into a device, and that device can respond with a full sentence. This principle is also applied to searches: where traditional searches mostly analyzed individual keywords, a conversational search looks at the whole string of words, to return human-like responses.

In order to find and display the most relevant results, Google looks for help from search entities. In short, it is a process by which searches performed by users establish a set relationship that help identify the importance of the various documents and, therefore, influence the information displayed.

#2

Wikipedia Example

Rich Answers (and other rich snippets)

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• Write to educate your users and search engines

• Consider long-form content

• Make your pages 10x more valuable than page ranking first

• Write to keep your users on your page, and in your website

• Layer in concepts related to your topic (AlchemyAPI or Cloud

Natural Language API can support here)

What Can You Do?

• Write to help Google match the intent of your article to the intent of the query (if your page is about Jaguar cars, be very clear)

• Synonyms are good. Google is better at understanding synonyms so you don’t need to keyword stuff.

• Traditional keyword research and traditional on-page optimization should still be done, but not alone.

What Can You Do?

Greenlane Search Marketing, LLC

Bill Sebald

bill@greenlaneseo.com

http://www.twitter.com/billsebald