Using Artificial Intelligence to Improve Search Engine Optimization
One of the biggest topics in the web industry is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of affecting visibility of a website in a search engine’s unpaid results. This means getting a website to be ranked high in a search engine’s results for queries that imply the sender could be a consumer of the site. Websites have the option to pay search engines like Google to show their site at the top for certain queries, however this can be very expensive so SEO becomes crucial. One factor when considering SEO is PageRank. In class, we have discussed PageRank as sort of a way to rank sites based on the quality of their incoming links. This means that in order to get your website a higher PageRank, you need to have a lot of quality incoming links. However, PageRank is only one aspect of how Google ranks query results so knowing just the PageRank value will not be enough to optimize search engine results for your website.
Recently, artificial intelligence has become a major topic of search engine optimization. One algorithm is the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), which is modeled by the flocking of birds. This algorithm allows separate bots to communicate and use information discovered by one bot by each individual bot. In the context of SEO, particle swarm optimization can be use to guess for weightings of scoring algorithms. The high-level analysis of the way it works is that one starts with different “flocks” or guesses that are spaced out. Then the guesses begin to evolve. One of the guesses will be closest and then the other guesses will adjust their next guesses based on this information. Just like as a flock of birds changes its behavior when food is nearby. In SEO, we take the PSO algorithm and use it to correlate known results, like Google’s US results.
In conclusion, many companies like Google and Facebook are investing in artificial intelligence research. AI has become a very desirable field because it allows programs to make adjustments in output based on previous results. Particle Swarm Optimization is just one algorithm used for SEO, but its use of artificial intelligence makes it incredibly powerful.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/using-artificial-intelligence-solve-seo/125079/
A brief article on the use of AI in search engine rankings. It will be interesting to see how SEO practices change as AI, like Rankbrain from Google, are fully implemented. Here is a good article on rankbrain: https://moz.com/blog/rankbrain-unleashed