How to Create Smarter Content Using Semantic Keyword Research

How to Create Smarter Content Using Semantic Keyword Research

Reader Comments (59)

  1. Now this was very enlightening. I think it was the first time I have read anything on keyword research and SEO that put it in such a way that it makes lots of sense. This one I will put into practice. Thanks.

    • I agree. This post makes more sense than everything I’ve read since I started blogging. Finally something I feel like I can use – reasonably.

  2. Wow.. Good stuff man. Never knew keyword research could go this deep. I like what you said about writing for humans, in the end, people are the ones doing the searching, not bots.

    Thanks for the great article..

  3. This is so damn deep into SEO. I love you for sharing this much useful information, Neil.

    I was wondering about this.

    How to Avoid Buying a Lemon from a Used Car Dealer
    -Definition of a lemon
    -Definition of a used car dealer
    -Things to inspect on a used car
    -When a lemon dies
    -Your legal rights
    -Who to approach and how

    I take it the examples there are for your subheadings, right?

    Another thing, Neil. What’s your take on density? How many times do you usually repeat keywords, or variations of those keywords?

  4. Really great information. This should work really well in our niche – lawyers. We’ve always put in things like “dog bite lawyer” but should add keyword phrases such as “bitten by a dog” or “attacked by neighbor’s dog.” I plan to put this in place today! Thanks Neil.

  5. Love the last bit on writing for real people first. When I write, I write for real people.

    I don’t so much write for SEO anymore. Not to say I don’t target. But it’s not my main focus.

    And if I do I always do it in the semantic way, if that makes any sense, lol.

    I can honestly say that this article is my fav this week. heck in the past month.

    Thanks for this. Awesome,

  6. More brilliance Neil.

    Digging deeper than most dig into SEO. Getting into the meaning of searches helps you find your audience, and as Hector says above, always write for your audience – people – first, not search engines. Search engines do not buy your stuff or join your team. People do.

    Thanks for sharing with us!

    Ryan

  7. Love it Neil,

    I have been practicing this type of process for quite some time in ecommerce content building. I started using “Google Sets” in the way back and “Quintura.” When telling my clients, I label them co-occurrence terms. I have seen great results with this type of “semantic’ keyword integration into website copy related to long tails. You can appropriately message them neatly into headlines and other areas.

    Thanks+

  8. I like the fact that not only did you show readers how to do keyword research, you also showed them how to use those keywords to easily write copy. It’s cool that you emphasized that writing for keywords is not enough. You need to always write with the reader in mind.

  9. Sigh. Another great article. Sigh. It means I have to rethink the entire SEO thing once again. And dive into my left brain again.
    Do you happen to have a version of this article for the right brainers out there – us creative types that cringe when even looking at the initials SEO?

  10. Great article: core, supporting, and stemming. IMMEDIATELY putting that into practice.

    On another note, I find it ironic that after the 14 billion years to develop language, we’d bail it on by coining a phrase like “let’s not argue semantics”. Humans are hilarious.

  11. Fantastic article with some great tips although I do have to add that keyword research is important but even if you can’t get it absolutely perfect it’s ok as over time you tend to naturally rank for numerous long tail keywords which will bring loads of traffic.

    • Long tail traffic is fine, but targeted search traffic converts. We’re not in this for raw traffic, even with an advertising model. It’s got to convert.

  12. Wow. This is a very systematic approach. Nice to see a simple approach so you’re not just shooting from the hip or awkwardly including keywords.

  13. This is a really great article. It never occurred to me that Google would understand implied meanings of words – though I don’t know why.
    I really like how you broke down your keywords into sub-headings which can be used for blog posts – I’ve actually done this before by putting my site URL into the Google Keywords Tool and seeing what people were mostly searching for when they found my blog.

  14. Neil,
    This was one of the most intelligent articles I’ve read in a long time that talks about SEO in terms of content creation and the processes involved. Even the images you use should be related to the core terms. Google is a smart puppy but even more intriguing is it psychologically reaches the reader/searcher even better with the right imagery.

    Thanks for these reminders today!

  15. Great article I love your practical approach to what can be a challenging problem of praying you have used the right keywords to reach your target audience. Will be re-visiting my website and using this in future web creations.

  16. Thank you for taking the time to write this. I have recently been researching keyword optimization in my business and found this to be a tremendous resource. I clipped it to Evernote so that I can refer to it on my kindle fire whenever needed.

  17. Excellent article, I am going to go back and check my keyword densities and increase them with these core words and synonyms. I have avoided high density keywords because of the readability issue, but now I can increase my keywords so that it won’t be difficult for the reader to hear the same phrase over and over again.

  18. What a helpful post. It’s such a complex subject but you’ve broken it down very well.
    I’ve found that when you do the right thing your site seems to do well too but it’s definitely
    worth evaluating every once in a while.

  19. Excellent post it took me a while to fully understand certain thing but a fabulous read… thanks for sharing…web 3.0 semantic revelation sounds good.

  20. I like the “WRITE FOR HUMANS FIRST”
    i know we all are so obsessed with writting for search engines and optimizing we often stray from our goal that we are there to share info

  21. BOOKMARKED! This kind of detailed advice on keywords is hard to find. I will certainly be refering back to this post when writing for my blog.

  22. Just shared it to my guy who worked mainly play with the KEYWORD jobs. Its pretty interesting post and certainly worth sharing. Somethings are though complex to understand but I really liked the last point. 🙂 “WRITE FOR HUMANS” Just like the SAMSUNG Mobiles are made for Humans.

  23. Good post.
    Not only are the semantics important but one can get a huge leg up when we properly define the semantic HIERARCHY.

    In the visual presentation this is determined by position and size.
    The closer to the beginning of the document and the larger the text, the more important it appears. This is also true in the code structure.

    In the above example of using “lemon” to describe a sub standard purchase, the primary keyword phrase would be “Buying a used car” with the sub heading “Watching for lemons”.
    To properly inform the search engine that “Buying a used car” is the primary term, the markup would define this as a and “Watching for lemons” a .
    This would tell the search engine that lemons refer to buying a car.
    To put this in perspective, “Things to inspect on a used car” would also be in if used under the , or as a if used as a sub heading of the .

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