Gone are the days of optimizing content solely for search engines. For modern SEO, your content needs to please both robots and humans. But how do you know that what you're writing can check the boxes for both man and machine?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Ruth Burr Reedy focuses on part of her recent MozCon 2019 talk[1] and teaches us all about how Google uses NLP (natural language processing) to truly understand content, plus how you can harness that knowledge to better optimize what you write for people and bots alike.
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Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Ruth Burr Reedy, and I am the Vice President of Strategy at UpBuild, a boutique technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics. I recently spoke at MozCon on a basic framework for SEO and approaching changes to our industry that thinks about SEO in the light of we are humans who are marketing to humans, but we are using a machine as the intermediary.
Those videos will be available online at some point. [Editor's note: that point is now!][2] But today I wanted to talk about one point from my talk that I found really interesting and that has kind of changed the way that I approach content creation, and that is the idea that writing content that is easier for Google, a robot, to understand can actually make you a better writer and help you write better content for humans. It is a win-win.
The relationships between entities, words, and how people search
To understand how Google is currently approaching parsing content and understanding what content is about, Google is spending a lot of time