Synonyms, search and SEO

Or the “picture” vs. “photo” duel

In the Official Google Blog today, Steve Baker gives some (frankly unusual) insight into how it is Google’s algorithms deal with semantics, specifically synonyms.  As he points out in his post, it’s kind of funny and amazing what computers are good at, and what they’re not:

An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers. We can write a computer program to beat the very best human chess players, but we can’t write a program to identify objects in a photo or understand a sentence with anywhere near the precision of even a child.

But because Google’s primary directive is to produce search results most relevant to the query you typed into the search box, it must at least strive to “get” synonyms.  (Just as a refresher, a synonym is a word that means exactly or substantially the same thing as another – for example, “photo” is a synonym for “picture”, so if you’re looking for “photo editing software” Google should also provide keyword matches for “picture editing software”.)

And by Google’s own reckoning, they’re doing a pretty good job of it, even if it is really, really hard to do:

…our measurements show that synonyms affect 70 percent of user searches across the more than 100 languages Google supports. We took a set of these queries and analyzed how precise the synonyms were, and were happy with the results: For every 50 queries where synonyms significantly improved the search results, we had only one truly bad synonym.

According to Baker, they’ve changed the way search results are displayed to not only bold the actual keyword matches in the results, but also the synonyms for the keyword matches (i.e., “photos” as well as “pictures” will be bolded even if you only typed “photos” in your search query.)  Though the system does this where it has confidence there’s a true match, it will likely do this in a majority of the cases.

So what’s the SEO impacts of Google’s improving synonym-matching system?

Once again, it boils down to understanding how your customers naturally search for the products or services you provide.  If it’s reasonable for a customer to use “pictures” and “photos” in a search related to what you promote on your website, then it’s important that your site’s content reflects both these keywords.

Don’t conclude, however, that you should just stuff your site’s content – willy-nilly – with all the keywords and their synonyms you can think of.  It’s very important that you use keywords, their variants and their synonyms in a natural and readable way.

For instance, in search marketing, it’s appropriate to refer to SEO as “natural search optimization” and “organic search optimization”.  So, in our website, we say:

“For those interested in search engine optimization (SEO), the Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a natural (or organic) search optimizer to improve your website’s ranking in search results pages on Google, Yahoo and Bing.”

In this example, Google’s crawlers are able to index that we refer (in a grammatically normal way) to both natural and organic search synonymously.  No matter which way someone may choose to seek out a system like ours – using “SEO”, “search engine optimization”, “natural search” or “organic search” – we’ve ensured our site can rank as high as possible in the results sets.

Spend some time thinking about how your customers search for what it is you offer.  If possible, watch how people conduct searches – over their shoulders, for instance.  You’ll quickly see people interested in the same thing will use many different keywords and phrases in order to get to a common destination on the Web.  This is normal.

Adapt your website and its content with this reality in mind, and you’ll show up in search results no matter how folks choose to get there!