seo

It is amazing how much search engine technology evolved during the past decade. I remember when I was reverse engineering how they work by simply doing thought experiments based on common sense and how I would implement similar things (I do have a computer science related background). Often I was able to test my hypothesis with actual experiments, but sometimes experiments were not feasible.

Thousands of engineers, scientists, inventors, and scholars are researching and contributing to this field, directly and indirectly. That is millions of man hours of dedicated and passionate work! Web Information Retrieval is such a rich area of human knowledge and full of impressive findings, both in sense of cool ideas, and impressive engineering and scalability.  How come that most available SEO tools rely on such old concepts as are keywords?

Keywords do have their place in SEO, a very important one, but it is well known even in SEO community that ‘intelligence’ behind search engines understands more than just exact words or vocabulary synonyms. Just dive into vector space, and concepts like Word Mover’s Distance and you will get an idea of the power and flexibility of modern machine learning algorithms used to understand user search queries and documents they are looking for.

I have spent years researching this area of Natural Language Processing and Web Information Retrieval, have read thousands of scientific articles and patents on the topic. I implemented existing and my own solutions into several of my personal project and startups. Apparently, I have built with my partner one of few SEO tools which actually tries to mimic algorithms being used by search engines. We invented the concept of Semantic Flow, which when applied to a specific niche or topic, it accelerates discovery of main domains in that niche. Our experiments so far have shown a significant correlation between our top domains and those being ranked by Google. This is impressive given that our results are based on relatively small crawls, sometimes even as few as tens of thousands of pages.

Though other tools do enable users to analyze links based on phrases and even categories, ours is the first which I know of that analyzes topics! Therefore, it enables actual Topical SEO.