Category: SEO

The Web has been around for getting on for a couple of decades now, and massive industries have grown up around the magic of making it work for you and your organisation.  Some of it, it has to be said, can be considered snake-oil.  Much of it is the output of some of the best brains on the planet.  Where, on the hit parade of technological revolutions to influence mankind, the Web is placed is oft disputed, but it is definitely up there with fire, steam, electricity, computing, and of course the wheel.  Similar debates, are and will virtually rage, around the hit parade of web features that will in retrospect have been most influential – pick your favourites, http, XML, REST, Flash, RSS, SVG, the URL, the href, CSS, RDF – the list is a long one.

I have observed a pattern as each of the successful new enhancements to the web have been introduced, and then generally adopted.  Firstly there is a disconnect between the proponents of the new approach/technology/feature and the rest of us.  The former split their passions between focusing on the detailed application, rules, and syntax of it’s use and; broadcasting it’s worth to the world, not quite understanding why the web masses do not ‘get it’ and adopt it immediately.  This phase is then followed by one of post-hype disillusionment from the creators, especially when others start suggesting simplifications to their baby.  Also at this time back-room adoption by those who find it interesting, but are not evangelistic about it, starts to occur.  The real kick for the web comes from those back-room folks who just use this next thing to deliver stuff and solve problems in a better way.  It is the results of their work that the wider world starts to emulate, so that they can keep up with the pack and remain competitive.  Soon this new feature is adopted by the majority, because all the big boys are using it, and it becomes just part of the tool kit.

A great example of this was RSS.  Not a technological leap but a pragmatic mix of current techniques and technologies mixed in with some lateral thinking and a group of people agreeing to do it in ‘this way’ then sharing it with the world.  As you will see from the Wikipedia page on RSS, the syntax wars raged in the early days – I remember it well 0.9, 0.91, 1.0, 1.1, 2.0- 2.01, etc.  I also remember trying, not always with success, to convince people around me to use it, because it was so simple.  Looking back it is difficult to say exactly when it became mainstream, but this line from Wikipedia gives me a clue: In December 2005, the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and Microsoft Outlook team announced on their blogs that they were adopting the feed icon first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser. In February 2006, Opera Software followed suit.  From then on, the majority of consumers of RSS were not aware of what they were using and it became just one of the web technologies you use to get stuff done.

I am now seeing the pattern starting to repeat itself again, with structured and linked data.  Many, including me, have been evangelising the benefits of web friendly, structured, linked data for some time now – preaching to a crowd that has been slow in growing, but growing it is.   Serious benefit is now being gained by organisations adopting these techniques and technologies, as our selection of case studies demonstrate.  They are getting on with it, often with our help, using it to deliver stuff.  We haven’t hit the mainstream yet.  For instance, the SEO folks still need to get their head around the difference between content and data. 

Something is stirring around the edge of the Semantic Web/Linked Data community  that has the potential to give structured web enabled data the kick towards mainstream that RSS got when Microsoft adopted the RSS logo and all that came with it.   That something is schema.org, an initiative backed by the heavyweights of the search engine world, Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  For the SEO and web developer folks, schema.org offers a simple attractive proposition – embed some structured data in your html and, via things like Google’s Rich Snippets, we will give you a value added display in our search results.  Result, happy web developers with their sites getting improve listing display.  Result, lots of structured data starting to be published by people that you would have had an impossible task in convincing that it would be a good idea to publish structured data on the web.

I was at Semtech in San Francisco in June, just after schema.org was launched and caused a bit of a stir.  They’ve over simplified the standards that we have been working on for years, dumbing down RDF, diluting the capability, with to small a set of attributes, etc., etc.  When you get under the skin of schema.org, you see that with support for RDFa and supporting RDFa 1.1 lite, they are not that far from the RDF/Linked Data community.

Schema.org should be welcomed as an enabler for getting loads more structured and linked data on the web.  Is their approach now perfect,? No.  Will it influence the development of Linked Data? Yes.  Will the introduction be messy? Yes.  Is it about more than just rich snippets?  Oh yes.  Do the webmasters care at the moment? No.

If you want a friendly insight in to what schema.org is about, I suggest a listen to this month’s Semantic Link podcast, with their guest from Google/schema.org Ramanathan V. Guha. 

Now where have I seen that name before? – Oh yes, back on the Wikipedia RSS page “The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to as early as 1995, when Ramanathan V. Guha and others in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework.”  So it probably isn’t just me who is getting a feeling of Déjà vu.

We knew that Semantic Tech & Business in London this week was going to be a great conference with some real business message but we couldn’t have predicted how excellent the keynotes were going to be.

Straight from the recent announcement that Volkswagen are using extensive semantics for their product data we have Martin Hepp presenting the way that structured data enhances the web. Martin gave great and essential messages, describing how rich product data is destroyed by the web today. He describes the web of documents (quite rightly) as a data shredder.

Through several major points the other that hit me between the eyes is how so much effort is spent optimising the experience of a web page once a visitor has landed there — yet the web has evolved (and is evolving) to show users key information without visiting the page. That means we have to invest far more in optimising for the way your data displays before a user arrives. Richard has been blogging about the use of Linked Data and Semantics in SEO and SERP for a little while now and if you want to discuss how to make the data on your site work harder to get visitors to come to you then we’d like to talk

Steve Harris of Garlik talked about the way they’ve used semantic technologies internally at Garlik. Their customers and partners, on the whole, don’t know that they use technologies like this — they’re just impressed by what Garlik can do with the data. He raised some great points, hiring expertise in this area is hard, so they look for good software engineers and then train them in Linked Data and SPARQL. Their experience, like ours, is that developers who have built systems this way for a few months do not want to go back to SQL.

If you have a team of software engineers, developers, data owners, DBAs and project managers who you want to understand this technology then we have a proven two-day training course that teaches Linked Data from the basics.

Steve’s other key message is that this stuff is ready and possible for companies and it has allowed Garlik to do stuff they couldn’t have done with relational technologies.

John O’Donovan entertained us with a seemingly endless stream of the most wonderful (badly phrased) headlines. For him these demonstrate the need for comprehensive and well-managed metadata. He talked about the BBC’s World Cup 2010 project which built its site atop a triple store. Talis Consulting have trained many of the developers and information architects at BBC in semantic technologies.

John mirrors the message from Martin and Steve that this technology is ready, capable of delivering large production systems and has real benefits in terms of power, flexibility and cutting implementation costs.

We’ve been seeing this market mature year on year for some time now and it’s great to see three high profile keynotes all saying the same thing — Semantic Technologies are ready for you to use.

If you want to start using them, come and chat with us

This post sets out some discussion points that arose in response to a conversation with +Aaron Bradley on Google+. The conversation was prompted by Kendall Clark’s post which started by suggesting “an OWL ontology is like a public API for your data”. Aaron suggested that his OWL ontology may need to remain private in order to retain competitive advantage.

There is no value in writing ontologies that are not shared. If you describe your own data in your own way without sharing that ontology, how will you ever find other data that you could mix into yours at a later date?

The counter argument is that the data within your organisation is disparate and needs to be organised, but you don’t want to give away your secrets as to how you have organised your data. I am not about to claim that Linked open Data is the only way to do Linked Data. Linked Data within an organisation will allow data integration across departments to happen more easily.

But the ontology is not core to this. It is the way you can combine data with shared URIs that use open ontologies that is the killer feature. So if you want to protect anything, then you may want to protect those URIs. Now that we are talking about URIs we have already moved the discussion into the data layer rather than the ontology layer, and you’re still able to protect your data even if people know what ontologies you’re using.

An ontology is not going to give you a competitive advantage. Your advantage will be what you do with the data, not how the data is described. No-one to my knowledge has made a business out of trading database schema; but when they trade well curated data, there is money to be made.

If more than one organisation uses the same ontologies to describe two different datasets, then that ontology has started to create a data market where those two organisations can trade their data without prohibitive data integration overheads. Sharing your ontology helps you to grow your market.

If you are interested in having your data easily available via a public API, you will find that publishing your data as Linked Data, because it can be published with both a Human friendly HTML face and machine friendly RDF face, transforms your website into your API. There are standard techniques that can then be applied to monetize your data streams, and this may even include a paywall.

Of course you might use OWL, or some part of OWL, to describe how your data is structured, but if you need APIs built on top, then a Linked Data approach is proving to be a simple way to achieve both those aims in one go, surely that is more cost effective?

In summary: The data layer is where your competitive advantage sits. The ontology layer is the bit of the Linked Data ecosystem that is going to add value to your data through ontology re-use making your data easier to integrate, both internally and externally, and growing your market. Your API (either internal or external) can be built easily using a Linked Data approach.

If you want to know more about how re-usable ontologies can grow your market, then talk to us.

Congratulations to William Greenly of Volkswagen and Martin Hepp of Hepp Research GmbH on superb work modelling VW product data using GoodRelations and on the publication of the Car Options Ontology.

I’ve been looking around for a new car and I can tell you first hand that the car search problem is far from solved using the web of documents. I look forward to a day when I can really search based on whatever I’m looking for in a car.

The journey began as a strategic brief about contextual search engines serving content based on context within the site and possibly across affiliate sites, a big idea that was quite quickly bound to something more tactical. That being improving site search, Greenly says. “So the objectives were about site search and improving it, but in the long-run it was always the idea to contextualize content, to facet content, to promote it in different contexts.”

From the semanticweb.com article Volkswagen: Das Auto Company is Das Semantic Web Company!

When Semantic Web people talk about improving search through context, disambiguation and faceted refinement this is exactly what they mean. Looks like VW is one to keep an eye as they develop their ideas further.

Like many of my posts, this one comes from the threads of several disparate conversations coming together in my mind, in an almost astrological conjunction.

One thread stems from my recent Should SEO Focus in on Linked Data? post, in which I was concluding that the group, loosely described as the SEO community, could usefully focus in on the benefits of Linked Data in their quest to improve the business of the sites and organisations they support. Following the post I received an email looking for clarification of something I said.

I am interested in understanding better the allusion you make in this paragraph:

One of the major benefits of using RDFa is that it can encode the links to other sources, that is the heart of Linked Data principles and thus describe the relationships between things. It is early days with these technologies & initiatives. The search engine providers are still exploring the best way to exploit structured information embedded in and/or linked to from a page. The question is do you just take RDFa as a new way of embedding information in to a page for the search engines to pick up, or do you delve further in to the technology and see it as public visibility of an even more beneficial infrastructure for your data.

If the immediate use-case for RDFa (microdata, etc.) is search engine optimization, what is the “even more beneficial infrastructure”? If the holy grail is search engine visibility, rank, relevance and rich-results, what is the “even more”?

In reply I offered:

What I was trying to infer is that if you build your web presence on top of a Linked Data described dataset / way of thinking / platform, you get several potential benefits:

• Follow-your-nose navigation
• Flexible easier to maintain page structure
• Value added data from external sources….
• … therefore improved [user] value with less onerous cataloguing processes
• Agile/flexible systems – easy to add/mix in new data
• Lower cost of enhancement (eg. BBC added dinosaurs to the established Wildlife Finder with minimal effort)
• In-built APIs [with very little extra effort] to allow others to access / build apps upon / use your data in innovative ways
• As per the BBC a certain level of default SEO goodness
• Easy to map, and therefore link, your categorisations to ones the engines do/may use (eg. Google are using MusicBrainz to help folks navigate around – if, say as the BBC do, you link your music categories to those of MusicBrainz you can share in that effect.

So what I am saying is that you can ‘just’ take RDFa as a dialect to send your stuff to the Google (in which case microdata/microformats could be equally as good), but then you will miss out on the potential benefits I describe.

From my point of view there are two holy grails (if that isn’t breaking the analogy

1. Get visibility and hence folks to hit your online resources.
2. Provide the best experience/usefulness/value to them when they do.

Linked Data techniques and technologies, have great value for the data owners in the second of those, with the almost spin-off benefit of helping you with the first one.

The next thread was not a particular item but a general vibe, from several bits and pieces I read – that RDFa was confusing and difficult. This theme I detect was coming from those only looking at it from a ‘how do I encode my metadata for Google to grab it for it’s snippets’ point of view (and there is nothing wrong in that) or those trying to justify a ‘schema.org is the only show in town’ position. Coming at it from the first of those two points of view, I have some sympathy – those new to RDFa must feel like I do (with my basic understanding of html) when I peruse the contents of many a css file looking for clues as to the designer’s intention.

However I would make two comments. Firstly, a site surfacing lots of data and hence wanting to encode RDFa amongst the human-readable stuff, will almost certainly be using tools to format the data as it is extracted from an underlying data source – it is those tools that should be evolved to produce the RDFa as a by-product. Secondly, it is the wider benefits of Linked Data, which I’m trying to promote in my posts, that justify people investing in time to focus on it. The fact that you may use RDFa to surface that data embedded in html, so that search engines can pick it up, is implementation detail – important detail, but missing the point if that is all you focus upon.

Thread number three, is the overhype of the Semantic Web. Someone who I won’t name, but I’m sure won’t mind me quoting, suggested the following as the introduction to a bit of marketing: The Semantic Web is here and creating new opportunities to revamp and build your business.

The Semantic Web is not here yet, and won’t be for some while. However what is here, and is creating opportunities, is Linked Data and the pragmatic application of techniques, technologies and standards that are enabling the evolution towards an eventual Semantic Web.

This hyped approach is a consequence of the stance of some in the Semantic Web community who with fervour have been promoting it’s coming, in it’s AI entirety, for several years and fail to understand why all of us, [enthusiasts, researchers, governments, commerce and industry] are not implementing all of it’s facets now. If you have the inclination, you can see some of the arguments playing out now in this thread on a SemWeb email list where Juan Sequeda asks for support for his SXSW panel topic suggestion.

A simple request, that I support, but the thread it created shows that the ‘eating the whole elephant’ of the Semantic Web will be too much to introduce it successfully to the broad Web, SEO, SERP, community and the ‘one mouthful at a time’ approach may have better chance of success. Also any talk of a ‘killer app’ is futile – we are talking about infrastructure here. What is the killer app feature of the Web? You could say linked, globally distributed, consistently accessed documents; an infrastructure that facilitated the development of several killer businesses and business models. We will see the same when we look back on a web enriched by linked, globally distributed, consistently accessed data.

So what is my astrological conjunction telling me? There is definitely fertile ground to be explored between the Semantic Web and the Web in the area of the pragmatic application of Linked Data techniques and technologies. People in both camps need to open their minds to the motivations and vision of the other. There is potential to be realised, but we are definitely not in silver bullet territory.

As I said in my previous post, I would love to explore this further with folks from the world of SEO & SERP. If you want to talk through what I have described, I encourage you to drop me an email or comment on this post.

It is well known, the business of SEO is all about influencing SERPs, or is it?  Let me open up those acronyms:

Those engaged in the business of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) focus much of their efforts on influencing Search Engine Result Pages (SERP), or more specifically the relevance and representation of their targeted items upon those pages.  As many a guide to SEO will tell you, some of this is simple – understanding the basics of how search engines operate, or even just purchasing the right advertising links on the SERP.  Quite simple in objective, but in reality an art form that attracts high rewards for those that are successful at it.  

So if you want to promote links on search engine pages to your products, why would you be interested in Linked Data?  Well there are a couple of impacts that Linked Data, and RDF its data format, can have that are well worth looking into.

Delivering the Links – the BBC Wildlife Finder site is an excellent example of the delivering the links effect. 

The BBC started with the data describing their video and audio clips and relating them to the animals they portray.  What was innovative in their approach was that they then linked to other information resources on the web, as against creating a catalogue of all that information in a database of their own.  This they encoded using Linked Data techniques, using RDF and a basic Wildlife Ontology that Talis consultants helped them develop and publish.   The stunningly visual website was then built on top of that RDF data, providing an intuitive navigational experience for users, delivering the follow-your-nose capability [that characterise Linked Data backed websites] to naturally move your focus between, animals, species, habitats, behaviours and the animals that relate to them.  Each of these pages having its own permanent web address (URI).  In a second innovative step they provided links to those external resources (eg. Wikipeadia – via dbpeadia, Animal Diversity Web, ARKive) on their pages to enable you to explore further.  In yet another innovation, they make that RDF data openly and easily available for each of the main pages.  (Checkout the source of the page you get when you add .rdf to the end of the URL for an animal page – not pretty, but machines love it) 

So a stunning Linked Data backed site, with intuitive follow-your-nose internal navigation and links to external sites, but how is this good for SEO?  Because it behaves like a good website should.  The logical internal interlinks between pages, with a good URI structure that are not hidden in the depths of an obscure hierarchy, coupled with links out to to relevant, well respected [in SEO terms] pages is just what search engines look for.  The results are self evident – search for Lions, Badgers, Mallard Duck and many other animals on your favourite search engine and you will find BBC Nature appearing high in the results set.

Featured Entries – Getting your entry on the first SERP a user sees is obviously the prime objective of SEO, however making it stand out from the other entries on that page is an obvious secondary one.  The fact that ebay charges more for listing enhancements indicates there is value in listing promotion.

RDF, in the form of RDFa, and Linked Data become important in the field of Search Engine Results Promotion (another use of SERP) courtesy of something called Rich Snippets supported by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.  From Google:

Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search. With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.

Encoding structured information about your product, review or business in [the html embeddable version of RDF] RDFa gives the search engine more information to display, that it otherwise would not be able to reliably infer by analysing the text on the page.   Take a look at these results for an item of furniture – see how the result with the reviews, from sears.com, stands out:

Elements such as pricing, availability, are also presented if you encode them in to your page.  I would be leading you astray if I gave you the impression that RDFa was the only way of encoding such information within your html.  Microformats, and Microdata now being boosted by the schema.org initiative, are other ways of encoding structured information on to your pages that the engines will recognise.

One of the major benefits of using RDFa is that it can encode the links to other sources, that is the heart of Linked Data principles and thus describe the relationships between things.  It is early days with these technologies & initiatives.  The search engine providers are still exploring the best way to exploit structured information embedded in and/or linked to from a page.   The question is do you just take RDFa as a new way of embedding information in to a page for the search engines to pick up, or do you delve further in to the technology and see it as public visibility of an even more beneficial infrastructure for your data.

At Talis we know the power of Linked Data and it’s ability to both liberate and draw in value to your data.  We have experience with it [in SEO terms] delivering the links and have an understanding of its potential for link featuring.

I would love to explore this further with folks from the world of SEO & SERP.  I also work alongside a team eager to investigate the possibilities with innovative organisations wanting to learn from the experience of the BBC, Best Buy, Sears and other first movers, and take things further.  If you fit either of those profiles, or just want to talk through what I have described, I encourage you to drop me an email or comment on this post.  There is much more to this than is currently being exploited and to answer the question in the title of this post – yes, those interested in SEO should be focusing in on Linked Data.