Inevitably both search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) have their very own terminology which sometimes is difficult to get round. Learning the terminology is not a requisite to search engine optimizing your own website but speaking a common language helps you to understand much of what is being discussed when it comes to search engine optimization techniques.

As a webmaster it is only natural to want your website to be on the first page of Google. You also want it to be indexed thoroughly so that your listing on the Google index and on the index of both Yahoo! and BING will benefit as much as possible from thematic linking and keyword density. This is the point at which a 301 redirect can throw up unexpected issues.

As February closed Google added another new feature to Google search. Casual users might not have noticed but when you search for anything in Google at the very top of your search results you are given the choice to expand the search results by clicking on the “Web Show Options” command. This then opens up an expanded search panel which allows you to drill down to specific results which are just as pertinent to the search words but which you might otherwise have spent hours trying to manually find in an unfiltered search results page.

In the good ol’ days of search engine optimization (SEO), optimizing a website meant putting in some H1 and H2 headline tags and some description meta tags in the plain old vanilla HTML code and then pointing a search engine at it which would lap it up, index it deep and present it high. Ok, that was last century and in terms of the web where lifespans are measured in dog years we have now had about 105 years of continuous development so that piece of information has more value as a relic of practices of the past (like leech therapy for example).

The question how Google exactly handles language is at the heart of much of what goes on in optimization and form an SEO point of view it is of vital importance to your efforts to successfully optimize your website. Needless to say the task of handling language correctly, something humans do instinctively, is enormously complex for computer systems and it is found at the heart of Artificial Intelligence (AI) science itself.