This piece was written 10 years ago, out of our own theories about how Google understands linguistic structure. Today, with AI algorithms like BERT, we can see how right those instincts were. Below you can read the original analysis from that period and then see how it looks now.
We have said before, both in Google’s own guidelines and in our article on what SEO means, that the basic key to success in SEO is working with a good SEO specialist. And yet from companies that did not make the right moves we keep hearing things like “how do we get out from under this filter”. Getting out from under a filter is hard work, which is why taking professional help at the very start of an SEO effort matters so much.
Work with a professional SEO specialist and clear the problems you will run into from the first minute.
Reading a Specialist’s Quality From the Title
The title is one of the meta tags Google cares about, and it builds its preview of the page starting from there. Which gives it real weight. By the rules of a good title, punctuation marks are kept out: full stops (.), commas (,) and colons (:) are avoided. If it is a question and you want to signal that, though, there is no problem with a question mark (?). Google is not the only search engine in the world. Some of the others are built around the question mark. So if you are working in a question and answer format, a question mark is fine.
An example of a bad title;
Hotel, Hotels, Holiday, Holiday Guide, Hotel Guide, Example Holiday Portal
An example of a good title;
Example Holiday Portal – Book Dozens of Hotels for Your Holiday
Words Should Start With a Capital Letter
Google wants its own site to look good. Which is why it would rather not list pages written entirely in capitals or entirely in lower case, unless the content is genuinely valuable. It will at least try to keep them off the first page. The rules for a title are settled: words begin with a capital letter. Abbreviations go in full capitals too. SEO, for instance, is an abbreviation and belongs in capitals.
Nobody Who Cannot Tell an Inflectional Suffix From a Derivational One Can Do SEO
There are fine points of language that let you address a great deal in very little text. Let us start with the difference between an inflectional suffix and a derivational one. (In Turkish, where words are built by stacking suffixes onto a root, this distinction does a lot of work.)
Inflectional suffixes attach to the end of words, whether noun based or verb based, and let them form a relationship of meaning with the other words in the sentence. They carry no meaning on their own.
Inflectional suffixes let words take on meanings such as tense, direction, possession, and singular or plural, inside the sentence.
Look at the derivational suffix and the definition comes out like this;
A derivational suffix attaches to a noun or verb root or stem and produces new nouns or verbs from them. It changes the meaning or the class of the word it attaches to and, with a few exceptions, always comes before inflectional suffixes. A word carrying a derivational suffix is called a derived word or a stem.
To pull that together: when an inflectional suffix meets the root it does not produce a new, different word. But when a derivational suffix meets the root, it demolishes the meaning of that root and builds a brand new word. Google works on the difference between the two as it improves its system, and it reads how people behave around their search queries. Mostly, of course, for the benefit of people who want the searched word to appear on their site.
An example of bad use
Otel – Oteller – Otelleri – Oteli – Otele – Oteladi
An example of good use
Hotel Name – Turkey’s Hotel and Holiday Portal
For the effect of an inflectional suffix against a derivational one, look at these two searches in Turkish.
The search for noktalama işaret (punctuation mark): noktalama işaret
The search for noktalama işaretleri (punctuation marks): noktalama işaretleri
Break down “leri” and you get “ler” plus “i”. As you know, “ler” is the plural suffix, and plural suffixes sit among the inflectional ones. The “i” here works as a case suffix, and case suffixes are inflectional too. With two inflectional suffixes, the search results did not change.
That does not mean inflectional suffixes add nothing to a word or a phrase. Of course they add meaning, and the line is a fine one. In most searches there are very small shifts.
Briefly, for Anyone Who Does Not Know: What Is the Title Tag?
It is the part sitting between the <title></title> tags that describes the content of a page. Browsers, search engines and social networks all use the title to describe the content. An interesting title makes a serious contribution to SEO.
2025 Update: Our Linguistic Instinct 10 Years Ago and Google’s BERT Revolution
When we wrote this piece in 2015 we were running a theory about Google’s ability to understand word roots, word structures and the relationships of meaning between them. What we tried to explain then through linguistic rules like “inflectional and derivational suffixes” has become an accepted fact of the industry today, through Google’s AI models such as BERT.
What is BERT, and what does it have to do with this?
Put simply, BERT is the technology that lets Google understand search queries not word by word but as a whole, inside the context of the sentence. It now understands far better how prepositions and suffixes, the equivalents of “for”, “with”, “to” and “from”, change the meaning of a sentence completely.
Our analysis in 2015 was an attempt to notice the first signals of that semantic understanding. Back then we argued it was pointless to repeat words like “otel”, “oteller” and “oteli” in a title. BERT confirmed that mathematically. Google now knows every one of those forms points to the same underlying entity, the concept of a hotel.
How does that shape the way you write titles today?
It turned the philosophy we argued for 10 years ago into a core rule of SEO:
- Natural language first: your titles should read like a natural sentence answering a person’s question, not like a list of keywords.
- Intent is everything: targeting the intent behind the search matters far more than the keyword itself.
- Repeating variants is pointless: as our theory turned out to show, repeating the same word with different suffixes in the title adds no SEO value at all.
In short, the “meaning first” SEO we approached 10 years ago on a linguistic hunch has become the industry standard, thanks to Google’s AI. A good SEO specialist’s quality is now measured by how well they understand the richness of human language and the intent behind it, not by keywords alone.
In Short
To meet our SEO specialists, you can come to our Istanbul SEO office.
To pick a good SEO specialist, start by looking at the SEO work they have done. Where that work ranks is the first factor. To gauge how competent they are at on-page SEO, the first thing to look at is their titles. If you have read this piece, you will spot a bad one. Do not put your business at risk; look at our corporate SEO solutions.
