Today, any business presented on the Internet (and such is, in fact, any company or organization that does not want to lose its customer audience from "online") pays considerable attention to search engine optimization. This is the right approach, which can help significantly reduce the cost of promotion, reduce advertising costs and, when the effect is due, will create a new source of customers for the business. Among the tools with which the promotion is carried out is the compilation of the semantic core. We will describe what this is and how it works in this article.
What is “semantics”
So, we will start with a general idea of what the semantic core is and what the concept of “gather semantics” means. On various Internet sites dedicated to search engine optimization and website promotion, it is described that the list of words and phrases that can fully describe its subject, scope and focus can be called the semantic core. Depending on how large a given project is, it can have a large (and not so) semantic core.
It is believed that the task of collecting semantics is the key in the event that you want to start promoting your resource in search engines and want to receive “live” search traffic. Therefore, there is no doubt that this should be taken with full seriousness and responsibility. Often, a correctly assembled semantic core is a significant contribution to the further optimization of your project, to improving its position in the “search engines” and the growth of indicators such as popularity, citation index, traffic, and others.
Semantics in advertising campaigns
In fact, compiling a list of keywords that will best describe your project is important not only if you are engaged in search engine promotion. When working with contextual advertising in systems such as Yandex.Direct and Google Adwords, it’s equally important to carefully select the “keywords” that will make it possible to get the most interested customers in your niche.
For advertising, such thematic words (their selection) are also important for the reason that with their help you can find more accessible traffic from your category. For example, this is relevant if your competitors work only with expensive keywords, and you “bypass” these niches and move forward where traffic that is secondary to your project, which is nevertheless interested in your project.
How to collect semantics automatically?
In fact, today there are developed services that allow you to create a semantic core for your project in minutes. This, in particular, is a project for the automatic promotion of Rookee. The procedure for working with it is described in a nutshell: you need to go to the corresponding page of the system, where it is proposed to collect all the data about the keywords of your site. Next, you need to enter the address of the resource that interests you as an object for composing the semantic core.
The service automatically analyzes the content of your project, determines its keywords, receives those most defined phrases and words that the project contains. Due to this, a list of those words and phrases that can be called the “foundation” of your site is formed for you. And, in truth, collecting semantics this way is the easiest way; anyone can do it. Moreover, the Rookee system, analyzing suitable keywords, will also tell you the cost of promotion for a particular keyword, as well as make a forecast about how much search traffic can be obtained if promotion is made on these requests.
Manual drafting
If we talk about the selection of keywords in the automatic mode, there really is nothing to write about for a long time: you just use the achievements of a ready-made service that tells you keywords based on the content of your site. In fact, not in all cases the result of this approach will suit you 100%. Therefore, we recommend that you also turn to the manual option. We will also talk about how to collect semantics for a page with our own hands in this article. True, before this you need to leave a couple of notes. In particular, you should understand that you will be engaged in manual collection of keywords for longer than the duration of the work with the automatic service; but at the same time you will be able to single out more priority requests for yourself, based not on the cost or effectiveness of their promotion, but focusing primarily on the specifics of your company, its vector and features of the services provided.
Identification of topics
First of all, when speaking about how to collect semantics for a page in manual mode, you need to pay attention to the subject of the company, its scope of activity. We give a simple example: if your site represents a company selling spare parts, then the basis for its semantics will, of course, be the queries that have the highest frequency of use (something like “auto parts for Ford”).
As experts in search engine promotion say, do not be afraid at this stage to use high-frequency queries. Many optimizers mistakenly believe that greater competition is observed precisely in the struggle for these frequently used, and, therefore, more promising requests. In fact, this is not always the case, since the return from a visitor who comes on a specific request like “buy a battery for Ford in Moscow” will often be much higher than from a person looking for some general information about batteries.
It is also important to pay attention to some specific points related to the work of your business. For example, if your company is represented in the field of wholesale sales, the semantic core should display keywords such as “wholesale”, “buy in bulk” and so on. After all, a user who wishes to purchase your product or service in a retail version will simply not be interested in you.
We focus on the visitor
The next step in our work is to focus on what the user is looking for. If you want to know how to collect the semantics for a page according to what the visitor is looking for, you need to turn to the key queries that he makes. To do this, there are services such as Yandex.Wordstat and the Google Keyword External Tool. These projects serve as a guide for webmasters to search for Internet traffic and provide an opportunity to identify interesting niches for their projects.
They work very simply: you need to “drive” a search query into the appropriate form, based on which you will search for relevant, more precise ones. Thus, those high-frequency keywords that were installed in the previous step are useful here.
Filtration
If you want to collect semantics for CEOs, the most effective approach for you will be to further screen out “unnecessary" requests that may not be suitable for your project. These, in particular, include some keywords that are relevant to your semantic core in terms of morphology, but differ in their essence. This should include keywords that will not properly characterize your project or will do it wrong.
Therefore, before collecting the semantics of keywords, it will be necessary to get rid of inappropriate ones. This is done very simply: from the entire list of keywords compiled for your project, you need to select the ones that are unnecessary or inappropriate for the site and just delete them. In the process of such filtering, you will install the most appropriate of the queries that you will be guided in the future.
In addition to a semantic analysis of the keywords presented, due attention also needs to be paid to filtering them by the number of requests.
You can do this using the same Google Keyword Tool and Yandex.Wordstat. Having scored a request in the search form, you will receive not only additional keywords, but also find out how many times a particular request is made within a month. So you will see the approximate amount of search traffic that can be obtained through promotion on these keys. Most of all at this stage we are interested in the rejection of less-used, unpopular and simply low-frequency queries, the promotion of which will be extra costs for us.
Page Distribution
After the list of the keywords most suitable for your project has been received, you need to start comparing these requests with the pages of your site that will be promoted through them. The most important thing here is to determine which of the pages is most relevant to a particular request. Moreover, the correction should also be made for the link weight inherent in a particular page. Let's say the ratio is approximately this: the more competitive the request, the more the cited page should be chosen for it. This means that in working with the most competitive, we must use the main one, and for those in which there is less competition, pages of the third level of nesting and so on are quite suitable.
Competitor analysis
Do not forget that you can always “spy” on how the promotion of sites located on the “top” positions of search engines for your key queries is carried out. However, before collecting the semantics of competitors, it is necessary to decide which sites we can relate to this list. It will not always include resources that belong to your business competitors.
Perhaps, from the point of view of search engines, these companies are engaged in promotion according to other requests, therefore we recommend paying attention to such a component as morphology. Just type in the search form the queries from your semantic core - and you will see your competitors for extradition. Next, you just need to analyze them: look at the parameters of the domain names of these sites, collect semantics. What is this procedure, and how easy it is to implement it using automated systems, we have already described above.
General recommendations
In addition to all that has already been described above, I would also like to present some general tips that are given by experienced optimizers. The first is the need to deal with a combination of high and low frequency queries. If you focus on only one category of them, the promotion campaign may fail. If you select only “tweeters”, they will not give you the right targeted visitors looking for something specific. On the other hand, low-frequency queries will not give you the right amount of attendance.
You already know how to collect semantics. Wordstat and the Google Keyword Tool will help you determine which words are searched along with your key searches. However, do not forget about associative words and typos. These categories of requests can be very beneficial if you use them in your promotion. Both in the first and in the second we can get a certain amount of traffic; and if the request is low-competitive, but targeted for us, such traffic will also be as accessible as possible.
Some users often have a question: how to collect semantics for Google / Yandex? This means that optimizers focus on a specific search engine, promoting their project. In fact, this approach is fully justified, but there are no significant differences. Yes, each of the search engines works with its own filtering and content search algorithms, but it’s quite difficult to guess where the site will be ranked higher. You can find only some general recommendations on what promotion strategies should be applied if you are working with one or another PS, but there are no universal rules for that (all the more so in a tested and public form).
Compilation of semantics for an advertising campaign
You may have a question about how to collect semantics for "Direct"? We answer: in general, the procedure corresponds to the one described above. It is necessary to decide: which queries your site is relevant to, which pages will interest the user the most (and for which key queries), the promotion of which of the keys will be most profitable for you, and so on.
The specifics of how to collect the semantics for "Direct" (or any other advertising aggregator) is that you need to categorically refuse non-thematic traffic, since the cost of a click is much higher than in the case of search engine optimization. To do this, use “stop words” (or “negative keywords”). To understand how to assemble a semantic core with negative keywords, you need more in-depth knowledge. In this case, we are talking about such words that can lead to your website traffic that is not interesting to you. Often these may be the words “free”, for example, when it comes to an online store in which a priori nothing can be free.
Try to compose a semantic core for your site yourself, and you will see that there is nothing complicated.