Google is adding two improvements to their search algorithm as of 24 March 2009. The first helping understand associations and concepts relating to your search and the second is longer search result descriptions (snippets).

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

Refined searches

Google has now a better understanding of what we are searching for, it can refine a long tail (long keyphrase) search and understand word association. SO as you can see in the image below (click to make image larger), if I search for “scientific law of gravity” Google is able to know that “Newton”, “Einstein” and “quantum mechanics” are words related to this search.

They are now able to make more suggestions to our searches and target different languages (37 languages at this point in time), basically they are refining our longer queries, which has always been a difficult task in the past.

Longer snippets

When you do a search on Google, each result begins with a larger dark blue text followed by a short (usually 160 charachters) of description (otherwise known as a “snippet”), this usually gives an idea of what the page is all about. To give more context, the snippet hightlights your searched words so you can identify what you are searching for.

Google has now increased the amount of characters in the snippet for when we search for long tail keyphrases i.e. searches longer than three words. This addition to their algorithm allows them to highlight more keywords which you are searching for, thus giving you a better understanding of what the web page is about.

As you can see in the above image (click to make larger), I searched for “online marketing social media company cape town”. The two highlighted results are examples of Google’s new algorithm change in action.

I have done a few searches already and cannot see a remarkable change so far but I’m sure as Google begins to index the web these type of results will become more visible.

So what do these changes mean for SEO?

It is speculation but the second mentioned change could become very important for SEO, it could mean that webmasters and SEO‘ers need to start inserting one or two more keywords into their content. We as SEO‘ers need a holistic approach to marketing websites online and take every aspect of SEO into account. Inserting additional keywords may not be the secret ingredient but it is always good to know what Google’s likes and dislikes are.

If you are wanting to find out what keywords search engines are favouring in your content I recommend using SEOmoz’s “term extractor“. It helps you find exactly what long tail keywords you should be focusing on, it could also help you when editing your title tag.