What Is Semantic Search And How Does It Work?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Semantic search is the ability of the search engines to know intuitively what your website is about by analyzing the content without focusing on specific keywords. Traditional search engine optimization involves optimizing a web page according to a keyword or keyword phrase, which the webmaster adds to his web page a certain number of times to ensure that his site is ranked accordingly. With semantic search you can rank for a keyword phrase and not use it at all on your page.

That’s my understanding of semantic search. Keep in mind that I’m not an expert on algorithms. I have might have a few details wrong, but this is the gist of it.

Google is currently doing semantic search. You don’t necessarily have to use your keyword phrase in every paragraph to rank for it. But you should use similar terms and synonymous phrases so that Google knows what your web page is about generally. The search engine analyzes your overall content, links, photo alt tags, and other on-page and off-page elements to determine what your web pages are about then ranks them accordingly. In a sense, this is more intelligent content and doesn’t look contrived.