A few months ago I came up with a working definition of "semantic SEO" that goes something like this.
For most of their existence what search engines have done have is match keywords in queries to keywords that appear in a web resource. They've done this with extraordinary sophistication, but search has been by and large played out on a linguistic stage.
Technological developments have allowed search engines to make sense of the things to which those keywords make reference as things – specifically by identifying each of those things with a unique URI. The stage has shifted to one of meaning, on which language plays a leading role but is no longer the main attraction.
But it is not so much the existence of these uniquely identified things that marks what a big leap this is for search engines – or what big changes it demands for SEO – as what the process of identification facilitates. Namely, that connections from one thing to another may be reliably made and mapped. It enables the search engines to understand the web as a series of interactions, and to use that context as it negotiates what it returns in response to a query, the negotiation itself changed from a simple catechism of questions and responses to a dynamic exchange where the search engines make sense of queries both temporarily and by their context.
[continue reading]
{ 0 comments }
