Google Improves Search Results Overnight

Major changes affecting SEO have taken place OVERNIGHT in Google's ever changing, ever improving algorithm. Straight from Google:

We are constantly looking for ways to get you to the web page you want as quickly as possible. Even if you don't notice all of our changes, rest assured we're hard at work making sure you have the highest quality search experience possible.

Semantic Technology vs Information Technology

Semantic Technology, forecasted to be the future of search, is built on contextual relationship and meaning. Traditionally computers were limited to very mathematical relationships. Context and meaning were relegated to only human activity, something computers were not equipped or built to provide. Evolving semantic technology redefines the type of intelligence which can be utilized. Computer programs have evolved from one on one preprogrammed predefined relationships to functions based on intuitive concepts and abstract relationships.

This is a profound change for SEO. Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic Technology enables the computer to make cognitive jumps between related words based on context. Semantic based search will draw in words based on context not just content.

Straight from The Official Google Blog

Starting today, we're deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Longer Snipets for Searches of Three of More Words

When you search for a phrase in Google you will notice that the words you queried are bolded in the results. The small description found with each search result is referred to as the snipet. When you put a short search in the query box, a search of one to three words, there is plenty of opportunity to display those highlighted terms within a two line snipet.

For searches of more than three words a snipets will now be occationally expanded to three lines to allow for the highlighing of more terms from the query.

• Remember that your average searcher on the internet has gained in sophistication and that longer multiple word searches have become standard practice.
• Snippets are what searchers use to choose which links from the search results will most likely solve their problem or answer their question. An extra line of snippet is more opportunity to provide quality information about your site.
  

Google AdWords- The Keyword Tool

Google AdWords does provide a way internally to get suggestions for keywords in your marketplace, its called the Keyword Tool. This tool is found when drilling into the account at the 'keyword' level. This means you have clicked past both the Campaign and Ad Group levels to display your keywords and ads.

This tool is free to AdWords users, so great right. Well in the past not as much because depending on what you gave the tool as a starting term for more suggestions, the tool spit out those suggestions from most general (least useful) to specific. Furthermore, the only information associated with these suggestions was 2 simple horizontal bar graphs detailing, 'advertiser competition' and 'search volume'. So hopefully your are following me in that no numeric data was given whatsoever.

Now Google has expanded the tool to return suggestions with 'approximate search volume' for the last month and 'approximate average search volume' with an actual value. Practically speaking, your campaign has only to spend a predetermined amount any way, so its not as if one regularly finds him or herself adding up search volumes, but it is nice to quantify what Google used to shove into a half inch blue bar.

When it comes down to it, we need to have all the necessary keywords in the PPC account regardless of search volume because we need to target what it is we have deemed necessary in achieving our projected goals. That is, we do the best we can with what we can in the given market with a given budget for a certain business model. But I can say it is significant that Google's Keyword tool is a bit more useful, and frankly it is nice to see Google sharing any real data with us at all. I'm sure tired of getting email replies that might as well have been some fraction of a bar graph. But Google must be listening to the people to some extent in changes as little as this one.