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Assuming a page is about red widgets, I'm using the following:
<h1>Red widget</h1>
Some text
<h2>Caring for your red widget</h2>
More text
<h3>Feeding your red widget</h3>
More text
etc.
h1 is used once at the top of the page, h2 and h3 I use for diffent headings and are repeated.
Is this over optimised, will it trip a filter?
I can find other pages of mine which mention red widgets above the page which is optimised for it!
Also, semantics doesn't "boost" the page. Essentially, looking at it from a webmasters/mild SEO point of view, it's a means of using alternative keywords to the same effect.
As a title example I used in another thread, Google knows that a "CD" is a "Compact Disc" (try a "~CD" search in Google), which means, as far as I understand it so far (and I'm still learning), that:-
<Title>CD's : Buy compact discs online here</Title>
is the same (to google) as:-
<Title>CD's : Buy CD's online here</Title>
Of course the first one is far more natural looking and easier to look at to a user. Consider that page wide and in terms of anchor text.
I don't have all the answers I'm afraid, but I'm finding semantics quite fascinating and I'm actively playing around with these things at the moment. It has helped me discover the reason for a lot of high ranking pages which I simply couldn't work out why they have the ranking they do for a particular keyphrase.
If you find a site ranking for "widgets" without that exact word in the title or entire body of the document, or even in a single anchor backlink, it's usually the explanation, and a "~widgets" search will usually reveal the "actual" word that the page is ranking for.
I haven't put that very well but I think you'll get the gist of it.
In your original post you cited a page of your own which was outranking the page you had optimised for that phrase.
Looking at it semantically, it's possible that the page you SEO'd is actually less SEO'd than the page that's outranking it. You just didn't realise it because you're looking for a particlar keyphrase ("red widgets") whereas an alternative semantic keyphrase ("shiny wodget") is actually being picked up by google and ranking for "red widgets" accordingly.
I'm not saying semantics is the answer to that original question, but it's definitely something to look at as a possibility. And something definitely worth reading up on even if it isn't the answer.
TJ
[webmasterworld.com...]
"Any clue as to the possible role greater reliance on semantics is playing in your never ending quest for more relevant results?"I'd say that's inevitable over time. The goal of a good search engine should be both to understand what a document is really about, and to understand (from a very short query) what a user really wants. And then match those things as well as possible. :) Better semantic understanding helps with both those prerequisites and makes the matching easier.
And the specific responses on the semantic point from some of the WW senior members.
Also, perhaps as relevant to your particular question, the same points in relation to stemming.
TJ
I do not believe "the same" is accurate. The "~" are not as valuable in a title or on a page as the "real" word.
I suppose a parallel would be to say that the real word is H1 while the ~ words are H2.
My personal experience so far has shown that google consider the two to be the same in the widest sense. That, of course, is likely to vary depending on how competitive the phrase is (as is usual with google).
I also think (my personal interpretation of an LSI 3D "Map") that semantics competes with itself where a phrase may have two meanings. In other words, if "CD" can mean both "Compact Disc" and "Chocolate Donut" the relevance of the semantic correlation maybe diminished if there is not sufficient content on the page (or sufficient inbound anchors) to ascertain topicality. You could look at that as the integration of LSI to googles existing algo.
However, I do believe that google's ultimate objective, and one I can see them achieving relatively easily (and on some searches I see it now), in terms of the above example, would be to consider "CD" to be 'the same as' "Compact Disc" where the overall topicality of the page is clearly about compact discs.
This is the area that I think google is concentrating very heavily on right now. And it is certainly one very mathematical approach you could take in analysing 'natural' writing and link structure on the web as a whole.
50% of my above comments are based on pure speculation, the other 50% practical experience, so take it with a pinch of salt.
;-)
TJ
