Search Illustrated: Improving Rankings Through Keyword Clustering
May 16, 2007 at 3:23pm ET by Elliance
Early information retrieval systems were fairly basic programs designed to essentially to find a match between search terms in a query and those same words appearing in documents. As search has evolved, however, simple keyword-based matching is only one of dozens of factors used to find relevant documents related to a searcher’s query.
Because searchers are often parsimonious with query terms, search engines need to develop contextual models to help them better understand both queries and web documents. Search optimizers can leverage this by optimizing not just isolated keywords, but keyword clusters that offer a richer context of meaning for a search engine to chew on.
Today’s Search Illustrated graphic depicts this approach:
Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
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You know, it really is amazing how in an instant, a single graphic can convey a complete concept. Yes, the text is necessary to briefly explain the point of the graphic, but so much information is transmitted just by looking at the graphic.
This is worth paying attention to for all of we bloggers.
Neat!
Miriam
Excellent post! This graphic is a very powerful and effective illustration. I shared it so much, I had to share it with our readers here.
Hi,
Love the graphic and I think that what everyone has said is very true – a picture tells a thousand words!
The only thing missing from this illustration is the fact that the clustered keyphrases do not need to include the term ‘logistics’. Now that LSI (latent semantic indexing) is around you should also include ALL relevant keyphrases, not just the ones which include the target term.
Tom
I seriously just encountered a question from a potential client this morning for which this image would have been the perfect answer…if only I came across this ~4 hours earlier :-)
The graphics are awesome, and it really drives the power, and point, of clustering home. However, the individual balloons in your graph seem to be representing individual pages within site. Are you suggesting that the clustering be isolated to one page, or create new pages for each section, and then create internal links?
I provide seo services and I want to make sure I fully understand the concept of clustering.