SEO By The Sea, Bill Slawski’s pursuit of SEO insight by following Google patents, means is worth your time to follow him.
For those who don’t have the time to take the deep dive required to read his post, at least give a click over to Bill’s seobythesea.com. The short take-away is that you would be well served to write your content in a Q& A format. This isn’t really a revealed secret. I’ve been aware of the preferred SERP position of the Q&A pack for a long time now. But this post reinforces where search is going. In other words, many things recommended by many in the SEO community, re. meta keywords, are not the future. Q&A is.
Its not hard to see that search engines serve the larger percentage of searches with the answer to a implicit question. We usually search for the answer to some question, even if we don’t explicitly frame it as a question. Google is going to do the AI programming, but you still have to produce the content.
For example, you could create a page reading “We Sell Rare Gemstones”, or you could re-phase the entire page into something like “How and Where To Find Rare Gemstones”. The question is implicit. The seeker of Rare Gemstones is not typing into the search “who sells” but rather “where to”. You get the idea.