Formula For Keyword Connectivity

[Garrett]

The Search Engine Watch forum is off to a grand start with a hyper-scientific keyword research post from Orion, "a formal scientist, with special interest in AI applied to IR technology." His posts focus on "keywords semantic connectivity and what it can do for improving success across search engines."

The gist of his post, as I understand it, and I look forward to other interpretations, is that in order to find the best traffic for your keywords you should use semantically-related keywords on your site.

I derived this from a statement farther down the thread: "thus in Google, k1=car and k2=automobile seem to have a greater synonymity association (semantic connectivity) than k1=car and k2=auto." The word "auto," as Orion says, occurs in languages other than English - it's also the root of several other English words.

It's interesting to note however that when he ran his analysis on "car insurance" vs. "auto insurance" that "auto insurance" actually had more connectivity.

So how does his formula work? Here's his direct quote:

"Let n1 and n2 be the number of search results containing k1 and k2, respectively and n12 is the number of search results containing both terms. (One actually does a search for k1 then for k2 and finally a composite query consisting of k1 and k2). Using geometry arguments and fuzzy sets, it can be demonstrated that there exists an index, termed correlation index, c, such that

c = n12/(n1 + n2 - n12)"

This formula apparently helps most in comparing the connectivity of keywords - a higher connectivity helps with higher rankings. Why? Well, let's dig into the formula and see what happens.

(Orion emphasized that the keywords you compare have to be related, but not the same. I guess another word for that would be "synonyms.")

I'm using Google.

k1: dog
k2: canine

Here are my results:

n1: 52,700,000
n2: 1,860,000
n12: 999,000

c=999,000/(52,700,000 + 1,860,000 - 999,000)
c=0.0186516309

That's great, but now we need to have something to compare, and, as I understand it, this formula is for finding the keywords that will have the most connectivity and therefore relevance. So now we'll substitute in a keyword there for k2 - "pooch."

Our new computation, with the results for pooch put in there, is
c=999,000/(52,700,000 + 264,000 - 999,000)
c=0.019224478

Now, if I performed everything properly then from these numbers we see that the combination of dog and pooch have a slightly higher connectivity than dog and canine. Orion states that "the optimum combination of k1 and k2 is that one with the highest c-index."

Honestly I'm not sure why that would be - it seems that since there are more instances of the word "canine" than "pooch" that there would naturally be more connectivity between "canine" and "dog." That's apparently not the case though.

Orion pointed out that you should, "repeat recipe for other search engines. c-indices may change, which indicates that semantic connectivity is different across databases. (Very important for SEOs!)"

I'm not sure all you seo copywriters out there should necessarily get your calculators out as you write. I've yet to hear any trusted SEOs weigh in on the subject yet, and this is the first I've heard of Orion.

Read his post and tell me what you think.

[Ed Stockdale]

tell me what you think

I think Orion needs more bran in his diet. To quote another "formal scientist" he's spoofing you off. Perhaps he will also give us a fromulea for picking lottery numbers:=)

[Mel]

Its all very well to pronounce complicated theories that rely on long calculations to improve your SEO ---> So long as there is some evidence that search engines actually use these techniques in their algorithms.

IF they do then its fine to try to understand them, if they do not then you may be going 180 degrees from where you want to go.

First things first IMO, show that there is some relevance of this theory to actual search engine use.

[Dave Hawley]

"keywords semantic connectivity and what it can do for improving success across search engines."

Noun 1. connectivity - the property of being connected or the degree to which something has connections

Adj. 1. semantic - of or relating to the study of meaning and changes of meaning; "semantic analysis"

Now, perhaps someone can re-word the statement into laymen's terms?

What is his definition of "improving success across search engines" more traffic?

Quite frankly it's sounds like all talk no action from someone who has maybe never run a online business let alone a succesful one.

[moosedsm]

i thing you're working under a content level error. would'nt dog relate more to pooch than canine? canine is a sicentific term not normally used in everyday language, while dog is more commonly used. the average searcher is goining to lookup dog and pooch before trying canine. i thing this is an area that needs to be thought-out more by web authors. top level words are nice, but most people don't use them.

[rdroske]

It appears that your calculation is incorrect. The value for n12 (the number of results for both terms) is the same in both cases and I am sure that is not right.

[Peter (IMC)]

It seems to me that understanding what he wants to show is the first problem. In his article he says:

According to Fuzzy Set Theory ("Modern Information Retrieval"; Baeza-Yates; Ribeiro-Neto, Addison, 1999), the degree of term co-ocurrence in a database is a measure of semantic connectivity (SM) and can be used to build thesaurus for the database. Some engines use term co-occurence in their query expansion algorithms. Understanding how one can measure term co-occurence could be used to carefully select keywords semantically connected in a given search engine database. As an added benefit, SM makes unnecessary the excesive repetition of keywords (keywords spamming).

Now what does that mean?
Simply said: Look at how often (at least) 2 words occur together and compare that to how often these words occur on their own. The more often the words occur together compared to the total occurances of the words, the more semantically connected they are.

The formula Orion made simply calculates a percentage. How often 2 words occur together out of all pages that mention at least 1 of the words.

So what you calculate is which phrase has a higher relative density in the index. Relative because absolute numbers are canceled out in this formula. So it doesn't say anything about how many pages contain the words.

This is all nice, but for what can we use this new knowledge? Orion says:

a. test the best combination of paired keywords from a pool of keywords with the highest semantic connectivity (for that database).

Does it help in SEO? I doubt it. We want to know how often a phrase is searched for.

b. build a thesaurus of synonisms targeting that database.

That could work, but you still would have to come up with the words your self.

c. build a query expansion or find similars library.

I don't understand exactly what he means here. Sounds like it is the same as in b.

d. carefully craft titles and descriptions of web pages.

Perhaps, if you are really bad at writing, this could be useful.

It is my impression that these types of theories are of more use for ranking than they are for SEO. I would think that that phrases with a high semantic index will result in favoring pages that contain the complete phrase. That´s pretty much what we´re seeing already and what we would prefer in SEO.

Regards,

Peter

[jerrymac]

This is Jerry Mac with The Country Music Planet located on the Internet at http://countrymusicplanet.com. The article titled "Keyword Formula May Offer Ranking Advantage" is totally rediciculous. I speak with authority as someone who has maintained excellent search engine positioning in most of the major search engines. The key phrases that I have targeted are always real high. Here are a few examples, only a few of many. We are so easy to find in the search engines that all you have to do is go searching for anything anywhere relating to what we do. As of June 8, 2004, at Yahoo.com searching for country music we are #18 out of 38,400,000 results; at Google.com searching for country music singers we are #3 out of 734,000 results; at AOLSearch.com searching for country music songwriters we are #2; At AltaVista.com searching for country music singer we are #2 out of 914,399 results;at MSN.com we are #1 searching for country music entertainers. These rankings have all been achieved by yours truely without any help from anyone other than information I have discovered in news articles in publications like this one. We have never paid one red cent for a listing in a search engine. The one who wrote this article needs to continue writing articles, because he would not make a very good person to be attempting to get search engine placement. I only state the above facts about how well I have done in the search engines to give some credibility to what I am saying. Please, don't place any more articles this rediculous in your publication. It does not belong in the company of so many informative and helpful articles I have discovered here. Thank you Jerry Mac jerrymac@countrymusicplanet.com http://countrymusicplanet.com and http://countrymusicplanet.net.

[cbp]

jerrymac --

You are way off base with your comments. The example of your site doing well has nothing even remotely to do with showing that the article is ridiculous.

...that does not mean I agree with the article, its just your arguments are flawed (or non-existent)

CBP

[jerrymac]

I disagree with the fact that my comments were way off base. I said in the comments that the only reason I was mentioning how good my sites were doing is to give credibility to what I was saying about the article. I realize that it has nothing to do with how good or bad that my site is doing, but the fact that my site is doing good makes me an expert in the field of search engine positioning, and I challenge anyone to do better than I can with the same tools I am working with including you. I stand by my original comments that this article does not belong in the company of the other great articles I have seen posted here. Don't want to discuss this any further, but you feel free to discuss away all you want to.