BAG OF WORDS MODEL AND SEO

The well-known quote by Gertrude Stein is a nice instance that indicates how complex human language can be. The word is ambiguous and allows for a couple of interpretations. Stein said as follows “the poet should use the name of the factor and the factor was there.” A curious human reader can come to a comparable conclusion. But can we create a clever set of rules that is capable of understanding the meaning of human language? 

In this article, I will attempt to shed some light on the way engines like google locate files associated with a user’s query. I can even display a few procedures that may be used to extract semantics that means from a proposition. 

Before Google delivered RankBrain, semantic search and all things machine learning, the existence of SEOs appeared to be easier. Now we’ve uncovered tons of speculative facts from industry influencers. To make matters worse, Google’s spokesperson shares ambiguous bits of data about the exceptional indicators and repeat the “Content is king” mantra. Is there a way to inform assumptions from actual data about the algorithms? The solution is “yes”. There are fields of computer science, which might help in natural language processing and facts retrieval, that cope with a large set of troubles associated with SEO. There exist well-documented algorithms for textual content category and retrieval of applicable files in reaction to a consumer query. 

WHAT IS BAG OF WORDS?

The bag-of-words is a model utilized in natural language processing to symbolize textual content (something from a search question to a full-scale book). Although the idea dates back to the 1950s, it is still used for textual content class and facts retrieval (i.e. engines like google). I will use it to reveal how engines like google can discover an applicable report from a group in response to a search question. If we need to symbolize textual content because of the bag-of-words, we simply depend on the wide variety of each distinct word that seems in the textual content and listing those counts (in mathematical terms, it’s far a vector). Before counting, you could follow pre-processing strategies defined in the preceding part of the article. 

As a result, one loses all of the data about the textual content structure, syntax, and grammar of the material. There is not much sensible use in representing separate textual content as a listing of digits. However, if we’ve got a set of files (e.g., all of the webpages listed with the aid of using a certain search engine), we can construct a vector area version out of the available texts. The period can also additionally sound horrifying however in fact, the concept is alternatively simple. 

 Imagine a spreadsheet wherein every column represents the bag-of-phrases of a textual content (textual content vector), and every row represents a phrase from the collection of those texts (phrase vector). The quantity of columns equals the number of files in the series.  

The quantity of rows equals the number of specific words which might be observed throughout the complete series of files. The price in the intersection of every row and column is the number of instances the corresponding word appears in the corresponding textual content. The spreadsheet beneath represents the vector area for a few plays with the aid of using Shakespeare. For the sake of simplicity, we’re the usage of simply 4 phrases. 

Why is the Bag-of-Words algorithm used? 

 So, why bag-of-words, what is wrong with the easy and clean textual content? One of the most important issues with the textual content is that it’s far messy and unstructured, and machine learning algorithms opt for structured, nicely described fixed-period inputs and by the use of the Bag-of-Words method, we will convert variable-period texts right into fixed-period vectors. Also, at a much granular level, the machine learning models lay out numerical information as opposed to textual information. So, to be extra specific, by the use of the bag-of-words (BoW) method, we convert textual content into an equal vector of numbers. 

          SEO take-aways 

• I doubt that the bag-of-words version is used these days in business search engines. There are models which can be higher at capturing the shape of textual content and remark greater linguistic features, however, the fundamental concept stays the same. Documents and search queries are converted into vectors, and the similarity or distance among the vectors is used as a degree of relevance. 
• This version offers the expertise of how lexical search works in place of semantic search. It is vital for lexical search that a file contains words mentioned in a search query. While this isn’t always important for semantic seek. 
• Zipf’s Law explains that there exist predictable proportions in textual content written in natural language. The deviations from the standard proportions are smooth to detect. Thus, it isn’t always a tough mission to flag overoptimized textual content that is “unnatural”. 
• It is critical to recognize how and why one splits a sentence into units due to the fact those units are part of a metric that each one SEOs use or are conscious of, namely, “keyword density”. Although respectable SEOs argue in opposition to it as a substitute categorically “Keyword Density is Not Used — How Many Times Do We Have to Say It”. And they proposed TF-IDF as a higher opportunity because it is associated with semantic search and bag of words model. I have displayed in addition in the article that each uncooked phrase counts and weighted phrase counts (TF-IDF) may be used for lexical in addition to semantic search. 
• It is also worth retaining in thoughts that grammatical phrase forms are most likely treated through engines like google because of the identical word type, accordingly, it is probably of little use attempting to “optimize” an internet page, say, for singular and plural sorts of the equal keyword. 

Credits: https://www.link-assistant.com/news/how-search-engines-work.html#part-2

More Resources:

• Bag-of-Words Model
• Bag-of-Words with Python example