Quote:
Originally Posted by janeth
Let me try and explain my understanding of the whole thing.
1. Semantics is the study of the relationship between words and meanings. A lot of people feel the search engines are heading this way. If so then they would be able to better understand what your site is about as well as know if you are sticking words into your text for nothing other than ranking.
2. Semantically structured is nothing more than the old W3C thing with a new twist.
3. And last but not least is microformats. A page does not have to be semantically structured to use microformating.
And I do not mean to come off rude but it seems that when the onsite SEO guys lost the argument about a site needing to be W3C compliant to rank, they just renamed it and kept on going.
And I am not saying that a site being semantically structured or text being semantically written want help it rank. But when a guy who claims to be an SEO points to the word "home" and claims the site is ranking there because it is properly semantically structured I really have to wonder.
The ranking boost you would get for a semantically structured site is not going to be that much and nothing noticeable on a competitive keyword.
That’s my two cents on all the big words. |
There was a discussion about this a year or 2 ago.
NASA was ranking No.1 in Google for the keyword 'home'...
Many of the world's
SEO experts, while toying with the question "what makes a website rank?" (as an
SEO is prone to do) came to the conclusion that the major contributing factors were Onpage. apparently having a PR10 will cause you to rank very high for any keyword that is on your page. Try typing "Image of the Day" or "multimedia" or "Interactive Features" into Google. NASA is nearly always amongst the top ranked websites for for keywords on it's homepage. That fact is not because they have links pointing to them with those specific keywords.
With regard to semantics...
Semantics is not purely linguistics (although that is the most popular interpretation).
Semantics is also philosophical.
Have a look at some of the Google patents.
Google has patents involving algorithms that measure how long people stay at your website, what they do while they are there, how many pages they look at on your website, where they go when they leave your website, how they leave your website...
As far as Google is concerned (and other search engines) there is evidence that they are trying to divert from linguistic semantics and make use of 'relationship semantics" (or philosophical/logical semantics) and reactional behavioral semantics.
Read:
Semantic Web Patterns: A Guide to Semantic Technologies - ReadWriteWeb
Chief Marketing Technologist by Scott Brinker: SEO + Semantic Web = SEO++