Yes, we all want our websites on the numero uno position of Google where people can find us easily and reach us. All internet marketing efforts focus all the attention to reach that position on search, social and all over the web and try to be found where people will be searching for their products and services.
We keep on saying that an overall presence is necessary to achieve good visibility on the search engines but let us understand why this is necessary by understanding the meaning of each layer of the evolutionary semantic web.
Everyone wants the magical formula to achieve the above said target. Is there any secret formula ? No there is no single or an instant formula to achieve that. The fact is that , this kind of presence and magically being found everywhere on the digital front is a result of logically building the presence step by step.
Some of the quality factors influencing search presence are:
- Content
- Connectivity
- Relevance
- Correlation
- Authority
- Security
- Trust
The web is shifting from the web of documents to the web of data. Hence in such a web the majority of the content is in RDFs or in the database
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| Websemantic (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
As you can see in the image above, we have URI and Unicode as the basis of the web. I would like to call it the first step which adds the keyness to the webpage and the content of that page that you want to promote organically on search engines or on the web.
The second and the third layer have the XML and RDF content. The content that we mostly have in this format is the RSS feeds and sitemaps which are in XML and the contact details, videos, reviews, events,etc now are being represented more and more in the RDF format. RDF has an XML syntax.
–Every Description element describes a resource
– Every attribute or nested element inside a Description is a property of that Resource
The URLs, titles and the descriptions are of the utmost importance in the XML files like the RSS feeds and sitemaps. If we focus on the keyness factor and try to cater to correlate to a wide range of keyword data rather than focusing on the keywords alone in the URLs, titles and descriptions it gets passed on to the next layer of the emerging web making the pages pass on more correlation and relevance and also syncs the on page signals with the off page signals which get directly indexed in the search engines in the form of feeds and sitemaps. Titles are not merely summaries, but are interpretative guidelines.
Now , from the URI, XML, RDFs we move to the ontology layer. The adoption of standards such as XML or RDF allows interoperability in principle, but does not solve the problem of the production, identification and evolution of knowledge. Ontologies reduce language to a nomenclature which describes neither textual structures nor the considerable variation of genres.
In general, an ontology provides a mechanism to capture information about the objects and the relationships that hold between them in some domain of interest.
According to Wikipedia: In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain. An ontology renders shared vocabulary and taxonomy which models a domain with the definition of objects and/or concepts and their properties and relations. Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web
Ontologies help take the direction of the web from information to knowledge. Ontologies are considered as meta language descriptions of documents, conditioning access to them. Metadata are to be found in the document header, while the data themselves form the body of the text, or more precisely the intratext. From the “Web of Documents”, the transition is thus made to the “Web of Data”, and then even to the “Web of Metadata”: this is the conception currently in force with the Semantic Web.
The URI layer adds text, the RDF layer adds data, the ontology layer adds the relevance, correlation, logic and connections but the security and the encryption pillar is the pillar which is the backbone of such an evolutionary web. If your website has a presence on all these layers or is built keeping in mind the outcome of each layer then your site can have the potential of having a quality web presence and a good visibility factor and gain the trust factor which is like the icing on the cake and can be achieved after a period of time after your web presence has passed the quality test of each layer.
Search is moving from word to word mapping to content relevance and correlation. Its high time we moved on from quantitative metrics to qualitative metrics. .This can be done by moving our focus from the keywords to the keyness of the content.
For that we have to focus on the following metrics rather than rankings alone to judge if are web presence is passing the test of each layer
- Content Keywords - Which give and idea of keyword variance in the index and relevance
- Search Queries – Which give an idea about correlation
- No. Of Impressions – Which give an idea about how well the search engine is able to combine and sync the on page signals with the off page signals.
- Landing Pages – This gives us an idea about how well each URL is getting indexed along with proper relevance and the correlation factor.
- Click Thru Rate – This indicates the success factor of the on-page titles and descriptions of the landing page for that relevant search query.
Also increasing visibility in more and more search options , rich snippets being displayed with the landing page, decreasing crawl errors and increasing no. of pages being indexed from the XML sitemaps are all quality indicators.
As SEOs let us focus on these quality factors and carve a special niche for SEO and establish the true meaning of SEO rather than ranting about the “Not Provided” data, suggesting a new term for SEO or start the age old story about how SEO is dying.
SEO is very much alive and has a quality dimension to it like never before. Thanks to Google for all the changes made in the algorithms , adding the encryption layer and also for giving more importance to rich snippets and social signals and thereby proving its constant endeavor to make search more qualitative.
