Semantic SEO: Your Website is a Goldmine with On-Site SEO 2

Gold

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You think on-page SEO is dead? It hasn’t even begun!

To be clear, your website is a goldmine and you haven’t even started to dig for the gold.

On my SEO 2 blog I have covered blogging, social media and search to the point of excess.

What about actual modern on-page search engine optimization though?

Or should I call it content SEO instead?


Most On-Page SEO is Obsolete but Some Isn’t

Most of the time I have dismissed the majority of on-page SEO as obsolete.

On-page SEO basics are usually built in features of even the simplest CMS software.

WordPress, the most popular CMS rocks at SEO by default! Yet it gets improved even further when you add Yoast SEO plugin.

Do you think on-page SEO is just about h1 tags, meta descriptions or enhancing website copy with keywords? Now think again.

Consider using the term on-site SEO referring to the whole site not just each page for itself. Now add the adjective “semantic“.

The semantic Web (sometimes also called Web 3.0) and its search are about meaning.

During its early years Google matched phrases without knowing what they meant.

Over the years, with the introduction of AI (artificial intelligence) and semantic technologies that changed.

Semantic search is based on understanding what the search query is about. We also speak of search intent.

What if you could use software to determine the meaning of your own content and categorize it in topical clusters? You could:

  • Make users stick with your website as a reader who would always find related articles to the current one s/he just read
  • Serve contextual advertising like Google does
  • Automatically improve indexation with “internal links” cross-linking related content

Doesn’t sound revolutionary? Well, what does it mean then?

In the early days you would typically structure news by location and topics.

Yet by now there are ways to find related content on your own site.


The Typical Categorization of News Confuses

Usually Europe or business are used as categories. Thus a story about fuel shortage in Great Britain could be found in Europe and business categories.

Now what about other relations? What if the story is related to another one from outside Europe or one that is not about business directly?

A reader keen on reading the latest energy and fuel news would not find anything of interest anymore amidst sometimes bizarre (think crime or celebrities) and mostly off-topic stories.

This is an actual example! The UK fuel story has been grouped with celebrity and crime coverage from Europe!

A story about a father hiding his daughter in a cellar for over 20 years and singer Amy Whinehouse and her legal problems were mixed with vital news about fuel shortages!

Yes, these stories have been been put together in Europe on CNN (April 28th, 2008). The reader will leave instead of reading more in such a case!

With semantic SEO implemented on your website you can make the reader find several stories related to this one, automatically.

  • Using this example: There are a few related stories out there right now: In Brazil the president speaks out about bio fuel.
  • In Singapore the oil price reaches a new high.
  • Venezuela and Iran plan to work more closely together thus limiting western access to oil.
  • Also there is another story about pirates freeing hostages near Somalia.

Now the first three are obvious. The fourth one is related too but how?

Pirates and other militants are also increasingly an issue in Nigeria where they attack oil tankers.


Semantic Technology Shows True Connections

How did I find out about truly related stories?

I used a (now defunct) news aggregator that uses semantic web and search methodology to determine which articles and news are related.

  • Instead of reading just one article or page I read 5 increasing page views per visit or stickiness
  • The website could show contextual ads about alternative energy or energy saving
  • Older news about the same topic could have been directly linked to the latest news automatically. Google could spider them and rank them up as relevant again.

Now this means

  • an increase of 500% in page views per visit for this example
  • serving highly relevant ads with most probably high click-thrus
  • new crawling and better ranking for several articles resulting in more targeted search traffic

All this impressive growth is solely due to semantic SEO implemented on-site. Nowadays most of your content gets wasted.

You can let machines dig for the hidden gold in your archives instead. So how do I do that or rather which solution can do it for me?

I do not know myself yet. I was approached by Nstein, a company that is “powering online publishing” for large publishers across the globe to help them spread the word.

Any method that looks like SEO 2 to me and that allows to potentially double, triple or even increase the number of page views by 500% in my case is worth exploring.

* Image by Kevin Rosseel