Online Marketing Comes of Age

The unregulated space of online marketing has been dominated by the cost-effective, sometimes technical, sometimes creative world of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Ever since search engines became available for general public use in the 90’s the geeks pioneering this industry have easily gamed the algorithm. Last month (September 2013) Google finally hammered the last nail into the SEO coffin by launching a completely new algorithm that tolls the death knell for the era of the search term. Once termed the ‘database of intentions’ (by John Batelle [was this really 10 years ago?!]), despite their seeming complexities, search engines have led a fairly basic existence at the mercy of those who choose to appease the algorithm and charge a pretty premium to their clients for the privilege. Until last month it was not only possible to demonstate that the masses searched using short string queries, but it was also possible to optimise for these searches and their many derivatives by simply creating more optimised copy and securing new exact-match anchor text back links to these pages. But now finally the age of semantic search, or entity search, is here, and the world of online marketing needs to grow up and start to understand the complexities of managing the new web of knowledge and how it is interrelated. Semantic Search Semantics is relatively easy to explain and touches the right hemisphere; entity search is more relational and complex and definitely a left hemisphere twister. Semantic search looks at additional sources of reference than that typically used by algorithms (keyword placement, prominance, frequency & back-links) such as structured mark up and other meta data (Schema.org, RDFa Lite and microdata). This information helps build the kinds of responses that you get from Siri, Google Glass and the Knowledge Graph results on the right of a standard SERP today. Entity Search Entity search is about how search queries can be broken down and understood in the context of the responses available. Here’s an explanation by Paul Bruemmer over on Search Engine Land: Structured data can be imported and exported from triplestores. Hang in there and bear with me for a minute… A triplestore is a database for the storage and retrieval of triples. Triplestores are optimized for the storage and retrieval of triples; they can store billions of triples. What’s a triple? To simplify, let’s break down a sentence: the combination of three parts of speech which form...