Rand just wrote a post called "The Search Engines' Semantic Analysis Capabilities," which a wonderfully informative article about, in essence, how search engines know about words and find out how they are used. He stated that perhaps this information can be used in SEO.

I would have called this article "Google knows Pooploads of Stuff About How People Use Words," and by using that title and simpler terms, I would have more people reading the article than Rand did.

Gasp! Am I stating that I am better at SEO than Rand? No, but I am stating that SEO professionals in general seem to forget who their target audience is.

Now, SEOmoz is for SEO professionals so Rand's title is appropriate, but let us say that a company wants to get more people to use their SEO services. More often than not they will use very professional, up to date SEO terminology on their SEO services website, right? Well, guess what? 

Most people do not know that SEO exists, nor do they know SEO terms

The future users of your SEO services do not know about SEO. They will not search for SEO terms. We tend to forget in SEO circles that the majority of internet users are not web savvy. We all know what keywords are, right?

No.

Joe Shmoe, who knows a bit about the web might know about keywords, might want to find out about how to choose keywords for his site, whereas Alfred Poobut does not know what a "keyword" is at all, but still has an idea that words are important to web pages.  (There are more Alfred Poobuts than there are "Joe Shmoes.")

Let's search Google the way "Joe Shmoe" does (he knows what a "keyword" is). He searches for "Choosing keywords for your website."

 

Now let's search Google the way "Alfred Poobut" does (he does not know what a "keyword" is). He searches for "Choosing words for your website" (note that he searches for "words" instead of "keywords").

 

Neato, my feedthebot page is numero uno out of over forty million other pages.

That is swell, but let's get back to Rand's article and about how Google knows pooploads of stuff about how people use words, or, as he puts it... "The Search Engines' Semantic Analysis Capabilities."

Is is important to remember that Google is not using this data to return web results for SEO people. It is using this data to return results for the general web user (Alfred Poobut).

Even when using terms that are "SEO-ish," Google still provides results that are more geared towards a general internet user (feedthebot has first page results for such things as "information rich websites" and "link schemes" as well).

I think that those who are offering SEO services are becoming too savvy, and as a result much of their desired traffic is going elsewhere.

Next time you are optimizing a page (or a title) for something, consider that most people are not savvy, and that Google does not return results for web savvy people, they return results for general users.

 

 -My name is Patrick Sexton and my website, Feedthebot.com explains the Google webmaster guidelines in simple terms.