Search Engine Diva

 Marie-Claire Jenkins (a.k.a CJ), the Author of Science for SEO has an excellent article How does a search engine know what words mean? 

My favorite section from CJ’s post is:  

“Language is very ambiguous (meaning can be misleading – more than one meaning) and so are the senses used by different people.  It is not always possible for the machine to give a very precise solution because of this variance.  In fact humans have been shown to be about 90% accurate.  ”

It fascinates me as an SEO how contextual words can completely change the meaning of a single word. How human perspective can completely change a definition for a word.   

CJ was also interviewed by Joe Hall at Marketing Pilgrim Where she explains Natural Language Processing in-depth for the layman. I didn’t realize search engines were using NLP since the 1950′s or how integrated it is in our everyday lives. Read the interview  Click here to continue reading

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) and  Natural Language Processing (NLP )is a very large part of how search engines work today. Wait! Don’t let your eyes glaze over just yet I am not going to engage in tech babble.  My own explanation of LSI / NLPand its use in search engines:

As our language changes and slangs are added into the mix it is difficult to determine the relevancy and meaning of a word without the context it is used in. As an example take the reference  ”911″  before 2001 we related to word to emergency phone numbers- police and fire fighters. Now it has a whole different meaning in our common language. So how is   “911″ to be indexed? What search results should appear?  This is where LSI  and NLP technology shines.  

  Remember the back in the day when the name of the SEO game was how many times and ways you could insert a word. Now it is called keyword stuffing and can get you hit with the ban stick!  And if you don’t remember those days then pay attention young grasshopper.

It takes a combination of words to equal relevance to a single term or phrase.  But what if