Is Semantic SEO the Marketers SEO?

This post looks at the cluttered web, filtering process that focus on meaning and quality in the form of semantic SEO, and simply good quality search marketing services – something we all can work towards. It’s a work-in-progress but I’d be keen to hear your thoughts. Thanks.

The rehashed bit…

Blurring the lines: brands in hands of the social web

Does semantic SEO exist? Most people would say that SEO is exactly that…SEO is semantically driven, as it is driven by the meaning of the words. Although this is only a relatively recent phenomenon in search engine’s information retrieval. It is not necessarily about keywords any more rather about key-meaning.

I needn’t explain why this is important but what I should do is explain it’s ramifications.

Most unoriginal statement of the century

Information on the internet is merging…uh oh here we go – heard this all before! Well it really is. (Sometimes we have to start from the obvious statements to build an argument!).

I want to remind everyone of how it used to be, in the good and / or bad old days…

Standalone websites > Internet in an Information Flux

Companies and websites used to operate online as standalone businesses, picking and choosing where their brand operated. Any brand that was mentioned in a forum or blog was relatively underground. This is a very important distinction compared to where we are now. Just think of the flux and flow of information on a topic – information is continually being encouraged to flow on and off a page through all forms of social media and the like. It can now take an increasingly wider array of forms, but what are the implications for online marketers?

The interesting bit…

Human and Bot Comprehension

We have become immune or numb to this information online, with clever neurological filters, but just think how radically it is different to a basic search engine’s comprehension of the web. Imagine the complexity of the information in it’s most raw form and then try to realise the complexity in evoking ‘meaning’.

Busy Crowd or Quiet Space? An online marketers conundrum

With websites taking various forms, everyone becoming a blogger and information transferring across various social media platforms, it provides a great deal of channels for marketers but so to a great deal of noise. For search engine marketers, this noise can be quite disruptive if we are using the same keywords and marketing techniques in similar ways. How can we stand-out? Does it mean fall into sync with your cluttered neighbourhood and unleash a torrent of content, or, leave some white space by stepping away from the crowd and promoting clarity of meaning? Both cases have been proved to be successful.

140 characters of clarity

Information rich societies are ultimately brand managers’ dream come true and nightmare all wrapped into one big ball of string. Brand managers love communicating clear messages, but are so too clearly misunderstood. Clarity rocks! Does 140 characters express a clear message, why yes, it certainly can. Can 140 characters express a clear message as it moves across the screen where 14 other conversations are taking place…maybe? My confidence in the clarity of the message communicated severely drops when I ask that question.

How can your website, your online presence in general maybe, take a form that markets your activity in a way that stands-out from the crowd, or even apart from the crowd? Your online activity, is your brand…what can you do consistently to represent your brand? Do you use the same colours for all your activity, the same images, same logos, the same presentation style? How often does McDonald’s change it’s logo?! These are the same triggers of recognition that provide visual meaning to your future contacts / network / clientele / friends.

Search Bots and Meaning

For the search engines that dominate the industry, they unfortunately don’t have the capacity to understand these characteristics…so they look elsewhere. In fact search bots have and do fail on many quality scores, focussing more on relevancy and popularity and NOT necessarily quality…hence the rise of social media sites, and more recently SearchWiki.

Search engines are coming around to latent semantic analysis highlighting the importance here, so this in itself makes it especially important in thinking along these lines.

In search marketing, quality is therefore quite obviously deemed to be important – it builds traffic and builds conversions. But what is quality in respect to search marketing? To me quality is something that has relative value regarding purpose and / or meaning. This is almost a definition of semantics.

Semantic HTML > SEO?

A guy I work with, Ben Hunt, from Web Design from Scratch, deliberately focusses on promoting website design that ‘Saves the Pixel’…using semantic concepts in coding and presentation. It works, and, he’s drawn a great deal of attention as a result.

He told me last weekend that he is currently researching [maybe you can help him out?] into semantic pixel saving, to see whether his hypothesis on the correlation between stickiness and semantic html is correct. Simplicity in design and marketing is certainly an option I like the sound of!

As search marketers this is something that we should certainly be interested in, but how can we expand it to be even more relevant to what we are working towards?

Search Marketing can take something away from this…

Semantic HTML might help tidy up the page, reduce the page load speed, increase cross-browser compatibility even…but there’s more to it than that for search marketing. Semantic-thinking, helps us see advantages of so many activities in search that already exist but aren’t always capitalised on…it helps us align our attention with what really matters: meaningful search quality.

Examples of Semantic SEO

I’d be keen to hear of people’s thoughts on the use of semantic-thinking in search engine optimisation, and how it feeds into everyday activities. These are my initial thoughts on semantic SEO anyway…

1. The use of long-tail terms would be one answer…long-tail keywords certainly get your message across clearly….but it’s still an under utilised facet of search marketing. A focussed long-tail strategy can create a great deal of quality, convertible traffic.
2. Thinking about keywords in greater detail, we can think about their role in the context of what has been said – our good old friend latent semantic analysis pops up it’s head again. Meaning is everything in search marketing – semantics in communication is therefore vital…
3. What about your landing pages? Are you focussed on who you are targeting. Have you ever written a landing page for [strictly] one purpose and [strictly] one outcome. I’ve not, although I probably should. One message, one call to action and one outcome…it would be an interesting exercise.  We so often provide too much information, and too many options.  This is why great designers are simply great at what they do: they can see what is necessary for the information to be communicated clearly.
4. Think about the page structure too…everything there regarding the order and layout of the content and code has weighted meaning.
5. Every sort of interaction of information (aka web and website information architecture) presents meaning to search engines…this is what we have to ALWAYS remember as SEO consultants. An example of this is where links act as a sort of funnel where surrounding text and anchor text’s meaning falls through the funnel and carries meaning through to the next page.

I expect there are dozens of examples, please feel to share where search marketers sometimes miss opportunities to express meaning in their day-to-day activity.

Competing on the grounds of meaning

We’re dealing with clutter by making more clutter, so essentially we are crowding the market by trying to stand-out from the crowd. The Tragedy of the Commons becomes all the more apparent as we allow our marketing activity to be driven in this way.

Digital space is essentially infinite, and it seems that we, online commerce and other competing organisations, are competing on grounds of size – scalability of content/keywords/links that drives traffic. And in essence this is how marketing has always been – a scalability game of reach, pick-up rates, visitors, etc. How about if we started competing more along the lines of meaning…scalability/presence plays a role, but more as a bi-product of producing meaning for all those parties your trying to draw attention to search engines.  I believe the best search marketers do this.

Semantic SEO ticks a whole lot of marketing boxes, regarding surfers, visitors and search bots. Shouldn’t this level of meaning be what we work towards as search marketers?  So is Semantic SEO the Marketers SEO?  Yes, I think it is.

[This piece is a work in progress, but I would gladly take feedback on the subject, so please feel free to share you thoughts...]

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