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SemanticSemanticSemanticSemantic analysisanalysisanalysisanalysis is the study of semantics, or the structure and meaning of speech. It

is the job of a semantic analyst to discover grammatical patterns, the meanings of

colloquial speech, and to uncover specific meanings to words in foreign languages. In

literature, semanticsemanticsemanticsemanticanalysisanalysisanalysisanalysis isused to give the work meaning by looking at it from the

writer’s point of view. The analyst examines how and why the author structured the

language of the piece as he or she did.When using semantic analysis to study dialects

and foreign languages, the analyst compares the grammatical structure and meanings

of different words to those in his or her native language. As the analyst discovers the

differences, it can help him or her understand the unfamiliar grammatical structure.

SemanticSemanticSemanticSemanticAnalysisAnalysisAnalysisAnalysisforforforforSEOSEOSEOSEO

Semantic analysis (SA) isn’t really about synonyms and plurals (stemming) as many

folks in the biz seem to believe. If there is anyone misconceptionwe hear the most, it is

that.

Conceptsand theme— basically the problemwith establishing on-page relevance is

that computers simply don’t understand the language very well (a 6th-grade level last I

heard). So they use SA to try to better understand what a page is about.

I like to use the example of the search jaguar. This could be a car, a big cat, an operating

system, a football team, etc.

To betterunderstand what the page is about, they look for terms/phrases that are on

the page to categorize it. In the case of the car, we’d find terms/phrases such as auto

mechanic, engine and the animal, short hair, hunts prey and so on.

Let’s look at a search for White House. This doesn’t necessarilymean the US capital.

This might be simply to a “white” “house.” So the system would look for things such as

President of the United States. Barack Obama and so on… you get the idea.

For example, using LSA, a search engine would recognize that trips to the zoo often

include viewing wildlife and animals possibly as part of a tour.Now, conduct a search

on Google for~Zoo ~trips(the tilde is a search operator; more on this later in this

chapter). Note that the boldfacewords that are returned match the terms that are

italicized in the preceding paragraph. Google is setting “related” terms in boldface and

recognizingwhich terms frequently occur concurrently (together, on the same page, or

in close proximity) in their indexes.

Some forms of LSA are too computationally expensive. For instance, currently the

search engines are not smart enough to “learn” the way some of the newer learning

computers doat MIT. They cannot, for example, learn through their index that zebras

and tigers are examples of striped animals, although they may realize that stripes and

zebras are more semantically connected than stripes and ducks.Latent semantic

indexing (LSI) takes this a step further by utilizing semantic analysis to identify related

webpages. For example, the search engine may notice one page that talks about

doctors and another one that talk about physicians, and determine that there is a

relationship between the pages based on the other words in commonbetween the

pages. As a result, the page referring to doctors may still show up in a search query that

uses the word physician instead. Search engines have been investing in these types of

technologies for many years. For example, in April 2003 Google acquiredApplied

Semantics, a company known for its semantic-text-processing technology. This

technology currently powers Google’s AdSense advertising program, and has most

likelymade its way into the core search algorithms as well. For SEO purposes, this

usage opens our eyes to realise how search engines recognize the connections

betweenwords, phrases, and ideas on the Web. As semantic connectivity becomes a

bigger part of search engine algorithms, you can expect a greater emphasis on the

theme of pages, sites, and links. It will be important going into the future to realize the

search engines’ ability to pick up on ideas and themes and recognize content, links,

and pages that doesn’t fit easily into the scheme of a website.