How Does Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence AffectSEO? - Nashville SEO

What Does Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence Mean For SEO?

Google and other search engines use machine learning and artificial intelligence to present a userwith the most relevant search. How does this affect SEO in the future?

You may have asked yourself at a time, How does Googles search algorithm work? Why is mywebsite not ranking? Well, youre right there with thousands of other businesses who have beenstumped by the search engine giant. How and why Google works the way it does are importantquestions to ask yourself when trying to rank your website. Its crucial to keep in mind that SEO isntjust a bunch of fairy dust. Its also not simple. There are many essential elements to take into accountwhen trying to rank your website. Just remember its not an overnight process.

A Simpler Time for SEO

Lets take a step back about five to ten years. An archaic time for SEO and internet marketing. Theterm internet marketer back in 2005 was almost derogatorily segregating a clique of spammers,phishers, and anybody who wanted to shove product in your face online. Heres the kicker, it worked.Many people could rank their site within days simply by spamming, keyword stuffing, and buildingcompletely irrelevant backlinks.

The Downfall of Black-Hat Techniques

Moving to 2012, Google decided to make semantic search more relevant and announced use of AI &ML. This means no more spam content, no more links that were unrelated to your website, no moreghost pages & island pages on your site, and the downfall of keyword stuffing, metadatamanipulation, and irrelevant traffic manipulation.

How Googles Algorithm Works Now

Googles search algorithm is broken down into many components. This is the only way Google canstay on top of the webs 60 Trillion+ individual web pages. Google uses artificial intelligence todiscover elements that, in a way, create a flow of ranking factors. So how can we really understandhow Google decides to rank a website? We start with Crawling & Indexing

Understanding How Google Works to Perspicaciously Optimize Your Website

Crawling & Indexing

Google navigates the web by crawling This means following internal website links from page topage. As a site owner or webmaster, you can choose which pages you want Google to crawl, or youcan deindex your entire site with robots.txt if you wish. Google uses their bot (googlebot) to sortpages by content, links, anchor text, and more.

Formulas & Algorithms

This is where it gets interesting. Google writes programs and formulas to deliver the best search

results possible to the user. Algorithms work by looking for clues to understand relevantly what it isthat youre searching for, then they use these components to pull relevant results from the index.

Ranking

After Google has used crawling, formulas, and algorithms, they decide how to rank a website. Now,Google has an unknown amount of ranking factors for a website, but we know its pretty high. I canmost likely list over 250 of them. All of these also have their own factors within. For the sake of yoursanity, Im only going to mention the top 5 ranking factors. These are open to interpretation as well.

Backlinks & Social Signals

I realize that backlinks is a very broad factor. There have also been debates about backlinks losingtheir value. Though, we have seen time and time again that a website with a great link profile andthe authority of sites linking to them, seem to take precedent in rankings. This means that you needto build backlinks at a natural pace that are also relevant to your site in some way. If you are acompany that sells cats, and your content on your website is all about cats, you probably shouldnthave a backlink from a website that is all about dogs. Google will not see that as relevant to yourcompany, and like discount the link or possibly penalize you for it (if there are enough bad links).This is part of Googles AI process to decipher content, photos, and more. Social signals are also veryimportant for Google to see that users are engaging in your brand.

See This Video On Backlinks

More backlink factors:

RelevanceVariety & Unnatural BuildingAuthority (DA/PA of linking site)IP & SubnetDiversificationLoss of BacklinksContent

You may often here the phrase content is king when it comes to SEO & Digital Marketing. And aspreviously stated, ranking elements have factors of their own associated with them. Content doesntjust mean throw 500 words on a page with a picture. Google also now uses keyword phrases,frequency, and relevance to determine the quality of your content. This doesnt mean length isntimportant though.

More Content factors:

Internal LinkingUsers Commenting & InteractionDuplicate ContentAuto Generated ContentContentUpdates Anchor Text Profile

Anchor text is the text that creates a hyper link. You most likely use this often when creating yourbacklinks (even if its accidental). The anchor text you use when creating backlinks is a critical partof linking. Google also uses this to determine what keywords you are trying to optimize for.

More Anchor Text factors:

Keyword DiversityUsers Commenting & InteractionDuplicate ContentAuto GeneratedContentContent Updates Onsite SEO

Onsite is an important part of your SEO strategy. The simplest explanation of onsite is optimizing foryour keyword. This consists of title tags, metadata, H1 tags, and more. Its also important to

understand why you are optimizing that title for your keyword, and how to generate it in a way thatgives a positive user experience. If your keyword is credit repair, you wouldnt want to just have yourtitle tag as Credit Repair Company. You want to give Google and your users an explanation of yourbusiness with onsite.

More Onsite SEO factors:

Friendly URLsNumber of PagesKeyword Frequency In ContentImage Optimization (Alt & Title)OverOptimizationTechnical SEO

Using technical SEO to show Google who you are, and what your business offers is also veryimportant. This is done by optimizing for broken links, HTTP status code errors, schema &microdata mark-up, mobile friendly, page speed load time, and more. The technical side of SEO ismore for search engines than your users. This lets search engines know that your site is complete forlack of a better word. Learning the basics of Googles Search Console will help you with a lot of thisside of things.

See This Video On Search Console

More Technical SEO factors:

Robots.txt fileXML SitemapDomain History &StatusBreadcrumbs & SitelinksCodeoptimization

Now that we understand a little better howGoogle works, we can determine what aboutour site is initiating or devastating your overallrankings. The next step would beunderstanding how users view your site, as

well as Google, to give the best possible experience for both search engines and users. Google isdetermined to give the best possible result to the user. This is how Google uses neural networks toattempt to ascertain what a user wants to see.

How does Google use machine learning to calculate the best search result?

This is a great question to ask ourselves. Understanding how Google uses these methods can help usdecide what we have to do to (hopefully) rank for our keyword. Many search engines use thesemethodologies for their algorithms. They use machine learning and artificial intelligence for patterndetection in many ways to understand what the user is searching for.

It may help to understand how neural networks work, and how computers learn things. The flow ofinformation in an Artificial Neural Network (ANN), works in two ways which is similar to an organicbrain. When it is being trained, informational patterns are fueled into the network by input units.This triggers layers of concealed units which in turn reach the output units. For an artificial networkto learn, an element of feedback must be involved similar to how our children learn between rightand wrong by their parents.

So how does Google use this process of feedback and backpropagation for search? There are many

ways Google can use this process to antiquate previous search techniques to reveal a better systemfor their users. Most importantly is how they user correlation between multiple variables to predictthe outcome of future results. ANNs are fed scripts that can be used to supervise learning on pastoutcomes to hypothesize a prediction. Combining variables is also important mathematically. Theremust be a distinction between multiple variables to provide an outcome. Decision learning workseasiest with the least amount of possible outcomes. Outcomes are predicted by layers. If you want tolearn a bit more of the technical side of things, please visit this paper by Google and watch this videoby Stanford. Google tells us that they use 4 main layers in their machine learning process (cited fromobserver.com):

Speech Recognition Google has developed and officially launched a new system that uses a muilt-layered deep learning neural network to cut down on errors by 25 percent. The whole area has stillseen a hand-engineered approach to structure that looks for nouns, verbs, something to indicate itsa question, etc., but Google is still working on developing a more sophisticated approach to naturallanguage.Natural Language & Search - If you think about a Google search, you type words orphrases and get back relevant results. It seems simple. However, machines have always justmatched keywords; when you type, how to change a tire, it looks for results with that phrase orsynonyms like repair. Researchers are now trying to advance machines to actually understandnatural human language instead of approach it like a bag of words. This will help machines generateanswers to more complex questions like, Whats a school near me that would be good for mydaughter with special needs?Sentence & Shape Translation - Every single sentence has a completelyunique shape, and similar sentences have similar shapes. For example, the shapes of the followingtwo sentences would be extremely close: Id like to change my tire. I want to repair my tire. Identicalsentences expressed in different languages have identical shapes. So, once a machine knows theshape of a sentence in one language, it can use that to look for the same shape in any other to getthe translation.Imagine Captioning - Theyve trained a neural network to recognize images very wellby feeding it good examples. The image is the input and the caption is the output, and the moreimages they feed it, the better the captions become.

Google has also given us access to their Prediction API. The Prediction API provides pattern-matching and machine learning capabilities. Given a set of data examples to train against, you cancreate applications that can perform the following tasks:

Given a user's past viewing habits, predict what other movies or products a user mightlike.Categorize emails as spam or non-spam.Analyze posted comments about your product todetermine whether they have a positive or negative tone.Guess how much a user might spend on agiven day, given his spending history.

Please see this large scale deep learning Slide Share by Jeff Dean for more information.

See this Slide Show on Machine Learning

To learn more about how machine learning works for search engines, please read Googles researchpublications.

How does Machine Learning & AI affect SEO?

I think one of the most important questions to ask here is this: Does machine learning and artificialintelligence affect SEO in a negative or positive way? My philosophy on this may be different thanother people in the SEO world, but personally I believe this helps us. If you are using White-Hat SEOtechniques, you shouldnt have any reason that youre not ranking on Google. Optimizing onsite and

generating great, sharable, user engaging content is what Google really wants to see. The restshould not be manipulated. It may take you a while to rank, but let it come naturally. This is whatwill help ensure your ranking to be static in Google. Remember, Google doesnt like Spam!

The only specific negative I see in this is that eventually, Googles algorithm may grow at a pace thateven Google developers cannot keep up with what it is doing. At this point, we would have to workon generating experiments as to what ranking factors truly matter to Googles brain. We mayeventually finding that SEO & site optimization are much more difficult than we could anticipate.This also means that it could become easier. In my opinion, its easier to give users exactly whattheyre looking for than to give search engines exactly what theyre looking for. If you have greatcontent and a great user experience, I wouldnt worry as much about what Google wants. Yourcustomers will be happy! And well, customers being happy is never a bad thing. Here is anothergreat resource for SEO & Digital Marketing.