The Associative Property of SEO: Semantic Web

As many of us in search know, the Internet Marketing and Web Development communities are all abuzz on this new semantic web ... thing. Though most of us still don't know exactly what it is or how to describe it, we're all pretty sure it's going to completely revolutionize the field of search - for all of us.

Thankfully, web start-ups like Dapper.Net are leading the way in educating the search marketing and SEO communities about how the semantic web works.

So, rather than try to explain, in words, what the Semantic Web is and why it is important to search, allow me to demonstrate by way of a Dapper API that we constructed. Dapper's API developer platform is a very helpful CMS that makes the process of marking up your web pages semantically much easier than utilizing raw XML/RDF markup.

Our Dapper.Net Semantic Web API

Add to your site   powered by Dapper

What This API Tells Us About Semantic Web

As you can see, our API (called a Dapp) classifies some key content of our homepage under pre-defined categories. What stands out most, at least in my mind, is the inter-relationships among various web content. In this way, the dapp enables search engines to draw connections between semantically-related content on your web pages:

1. The concept "social media optimization" is associated with that of "Internet marketing" and "seo service"


2. The image of our Gnosis Arts Logo is associated with the concept of "image optimization"


3. The term "web content development" is linked to the idea of "professional writing services"

So you see, now we've effectively amplified, augmented, elaborated upon each concept by associating it with other related concepts which aren't necessarily synonyms. The result: Richer, fuller meanings (semantics) are generated by my website, fed to the search engines; and, now my webpages "say" much more, without my ever having had to add any new content to them.

Another way to look at it: Dapper is kind of like an LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) application on steriods. It automatically allows you to create synonyms and synonymous phrasing (by way of assigning Resource Deacription Framework [RDF] ontologies) for virtually all of your web content. (Unfortunately, Dapper doesn't yet allow you to semantically mark up certain object elements, such as Flash and Windows Media video - but I'm sure it's coming!)

The "Associative Property" of Search Engine Optimization

Such functionality underscores a key principle of SEO and website promotion. Search engines rely as much on association as anything when assigning quality, authority, relevance and rank to a website. We learned this through our own experimentation, the results of which are published in our new e-book titled Guide to Social Media Optimization.

In effect, effective link building, intra-site linking, content development, TITLE/META tag construction and geo-targeting depend upon the auspicious associations the search engines can make:

• among your website and other websites (in the case of link building);
  
• among the pages on your own website (intra-site linking);


• among the concepts, words, ideas, and object-elements on your site (content development);


• among your webpage headings and the content that flows out from those headings (TITLE/META tag construction);


• among your website and its geographic/demographic context (geo-targeting).

In other words, a huge part of your website's online success is based on its relationships with our segments or factors of the Internet community as a whole. In fact, it was the knowledge of this idea which spawned Web 2.0, if you really think about it.

So, as I see it, one main task of the Semantic Web will be to clarify and create a kind of synergy within and among these inter-relationships. In this way, the Semantic Web is the attempt to create a Metaweb - a web of relationships among websites and categories of websites, as opposed to simply a web of just websites.