I’ve been reading various articles that make this claim lately and to some extent, I believe it is true. I don’t think it is time to abandon Organic Search strategies altogether but it is certainly time to consider some new methodologies. While we use ‘conventional’ SEO software packages everyday, we’ve come to rely on new web solutions, many are demonstrations of Semantic Web Technologies. Probably the most impressive offering is the OpenLink Software suite Virtuoso. There is a great demonstration of the OAT API and SPARQL from OpenLink that we use often, the OpenLink RDF Browser. We use the SVG graph feature to see how we can improve the way our linkage looks to Web 3.0 services.
We also consult the Semantic Data Extractor to improve our machine readability and Quintura is an essential part of our keyword discovery cycle. We develop tools ‘in house’ that compliment these technologies because we believe Web 3.0 is upon us. The interesting thing for us is that you hear so little about it in SEO circles, instead it’s the same old story, beg for links and work your meta tags. Admittedly, we are talking about emerging technologies and the final cut is far from complete but the movement towards xml and xslt seems to have gained momentum recently and we are finding new and useful transforms almost every day. Some web 2.0/3.0 methods are kinda messy, for example xFolk and eRDF and some are nice and clean like OPML auto-discovery and xslt’s.
I guess the best way to bring folks who are not familiar with ‘the revolution’ up to speed would be to recommend that you have a look under the hood of our home page; Website Promotion, go ahead, scrape the page. There, we demonstrate how FOAF, Dublin Core, OPML Auto-discovery, GRDDL and other machine readable formats can be used with HTML/XHTML. In many cases, it is as simple as calling a transform. In the beginning, we did most of it by hand, then we discovered Virtuoso which appears to tackle just about any machine readable format you can think of … effortlessly.
I know there are a lot of acronyms in this entry, this was intended as a top level document. We will drill down on these technologies in future installments and we will even discuss the Ontology project. For now, lets say that we rely on organic search to drive traffic Today but Semantic Interlinking is taking shape and makes proper sense in the effort to bring relevancy to web search.
For those who haven’t quite made the paradigm shift yet … we are just advocating a balance between human readable and machine readable web content, this idea is not new, consider meta tags as the first attempt at description, then think about how web services can improve the way interested people can find your web site.
To sum up, SEO is dying, there is no question of that, perhaps it is not quite dead yet but the web has the capability of discovering itself and Search Engines should take heed that their services will no longer be required one day. Unless your practicing SEO trickery, a short term strategy at best, there is great promise of relevancy for the future of web search.
Our advice is as always … offer real value, be honest with your site descriptions, take steps to ensure that your visitors find what they were looking for when they arrive … and embrace some new methods to expose your content to ‘the machine’.
Dave - CE - PSEM - RELAX SEO Services
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