Ask the SMXperts: The latest in advanced technical SEO

The Ask the SMXpert series continues the question and answer (Q&A) segment held during sessions at Search Marketing Expo (SMX) West 2018.

Today’s Q&A is from the Latest in Advanced Technical SEO session with Dawn Anderson, Bastian Grimm and Brian Weiss, with an introduction from moderator Michelle Robbins.

Michelle Robbins

Technical SEO is the foundation upon which all other SEO efforts are built. Without proper attention to the architecture of a site — in a variety of respects — the best content and marketing efforts in the world will not pay off in the organic SERPs.

We assembled a panel of technical SEO experts for our Search Marketing Expo event to address the critical elements of site speed, site crawling and the technology driving conversational search’s evolution. The speakers’ presentations were loaded with actionable tactics and tips that led to a lively Q&A with the audience. The experts respond to some of those same questions below.

Dawn Anderson

Slide deck:  Some Current Challenges with Voice and Conversational Search

Question: Search engines claim to now be able to recognize voices at a level similar to that of human error rate. Does this mean they should be able to answer voice search queries with a similar level of understanding?

Dawn:  Even though search engines claim to recognize voices and can answer comprehension questions on Wikipedia pages, this doesn’t automatically mean real natural language “understanding.” There are certainly some challenges still faced in meeting informational needs of users with this technology.

Last summer I was fortunate to attend the biennial European Summer School on Information Retrieval in Barcelona. Lectures were delivered by researchers from leading universities and commercial organizations like Facebook, Bloomberg, Amazon, and importantly, for this topic, Google.

One of the lecturers was Enrique Alfonseca, who is on the conversational search research team at Google Zurich and one of the researchers behind some well-kn…

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]

About The Author

Debra Mastaler

Debra Mastaler is Features Editor at Search Engine Land. She is an internationally recognized authority on link building and is an OMCP Certified Link Building Trainer. Based in Washington DC, Debra is also a columnist for Search Engine Land, has written for or been featured in numerous tech publications and is active on the search marketing conference circuit as a speaker and trainer. Debra serves as a judge for the Landy Awards and is the President of Alliance-Link.com. Connect with Debra on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay in touch.