by Caliber Media Group / January 8, 2015

2015 SEO, Structured Data, Schema, & Common Sense
The Semantic Web & Emergent SEO Technologies: Part I

Early SEO

From Mark Twain to Maya Angelou we’ve heard the phrase “common sense is terribly uncommon”.
It’s one of those expressions that’s adorably cute or even insightful at first, but might seem entirely too true after a few moments of thought. That’s why Yahoo (an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”) first showed websites in a structured directory hierarchy tree, back in 1994, Early Yahoo Search Engine logo because search technologies at the time couldn’t make sense of the web — so it was the job of humans to decide each website’s meaning. Yet, this approach to “search” just didn’t make any sense and would never “scale”.

SEO Now

The Internet of 2015 will witness an enormous amount of applied common sense, as businesses, government agencies and organizations leverage developing and emerging web technologies, within various aspects of both digital publishing and e-commerce initiatives, to transform how their digital investments perform.

Enterprise Emergent SEO Analytics screenshot

SEO Everyday

We enter keywords into search engines, asking questions in order to get answers. We easily type to ask search engines, “When will Stephen Colbert take over for David Letterman“, or “When are we going to Mars?“.
Google, as it turns out, is making sense of these sorts of common questions, delivering answers inside of boxes (termed “Knowledge Graph” from Google’s Knowledge Vault) along with the usual search results. What if we asked a more practical question, such as “What’s the cost of a 2015 Toyota“? Now, with this search query, we get a list of search results (surrounded by ads). These results reflect that the search engine understands the meaning of the question asked, and the answers to the question are exactly what the “Semantic Web” is all about, i.e., the search results reflect that the search engine really knows the meaning of the question and knows the best answers to that question. And, while all of those search results have many things in common (well, that’d make sense, since they’re all on page #1), nine out of ten of Google Developersthe Google search results have something else in common:
Schema (Structured Data) was integrated to greatly enhance each website’s SEO. That’s but one example of “Emergent SEO” technologies — and in subsequent blog posts we’ll discuss other disciplines within Emergent SEO, such as JSON-LD, RDFa (Resource Description Framework in Attributes), LOD (Linked Open Data), LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) & SVD (Singular Value Decomposition), FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology), even LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), and more.

SEO Construction

When architects and engineers start to build a building they have plans or schematics for that structure, to make sense of what goes where. Major search engines decided just a few years ago that they had problems trying to exactly figure out what goes where, so they got together to start Schema.org, a centralized library of a web data architecture intended to offer structure, behind-the-scenes, for online stores and for online publishers. This repository of structured data, or Schema, is simply intended to be used by publishers and e-commerce websites so that the search engines can more precisely make sense of what each website publishes or sells.

Caliber & SEO

Last November Caliber Media Group delivered a presentation introducing Schema — Schema’s recent history and how Caliber Media Group has been at the forefront of managing Schema for SEO purposes, to greatly enhance strategic and tactical SEO for Caliber’s clients. The conference, ProductCamp Southern California 2014, describes itself as a “user-driven, collaborative” conference for Product Managers and Product Marketers. The presentation, below, is entitled: “Products, Product Schema & SEO: The Product Manager’s Schema Toolkit“.

For the full product Schema.org and Emergent SEO deck please view our Emergent SEO and Schema.org/Product presentation at Product Camp, 2014.

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We’ll continue this extensive digital marketing blog post in Parts II & III, over upcoming months.

Please do note that these subsequent SEO blog posts will grow increasingly technical in substance, which makes sense.

Caliber Media Group has been doing effective digital marketing over ten years. To see what a custom tailored approach to digital marketing can do for your business give us a call at 714.867.1600 or visit us online at www.calibermediagroup.com for a free consultation.

{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }

Chris Regan January 9, 2015 at 2:27 pm

Regarding Emergent SEO, LSI and Mark Twain, we’d forgotten to work in this wonderfully concise piece from the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia titled, “Similarity-based Matrix Completion Algorithm for Latent Semantic Indexing” which addresses synonymy and polysemy challenges —http://comp.utm.my/andrimirzal/files/2013/12/SimilarityBasedMatrixCompletionLSI.pdf

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Alison Courtney January 11, 2015 at 6:33 pm

What of LOC, SKOS triples, et al., that’ve been emerging in SEO for a few years or, at least, very recently?
AC

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Caliber Media Group January 12, 2015 at 10:43 am

Thank you, Alison, for your comment re: Emergent SEO, et al.
Yes, we keep closely follow the SEO and Schema developments within the Library of Congress’s Schema/Ontologies — http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-5.xsd — as well as the W3C SKOS standard: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/wiki/SKOS
tnx again,
chris

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Ian Davis January 12, 2015 at 10:46 am

Structured Data has been acceleratin the process of coming into its own for the past few years. While still evolving, the facts are clear, implementing structured data (Schema, RDFa, JSON-LD) for consumption by the Semantic Web will contribute to Linked Open Data (LOD) and therefore feed search engines’ databases with discernible information (think: referenceable attributes).
For example, the process of contributing to LOD will feed Google’s Knowledge Vault and present a enormous rise in the organic rankings of any website — a site that’s pertaining to a person, place, thing or event, and display results in a “Knowledge Graph” display at the side (or even top) of the page within Google SERP’s or, again, as the actual answer to the query at the very top of the page when the query is in the form of a question (I.E. “What is the radius of Mars?”). Structured code gives a clear signal to the major search engine’s information storage and in turn they reply “I know what you are talking about,”. Your subject matter becomes the consummate source authority in the targeted subject matter related to the search query targeted by your website on the semantic web (the term subject I use purposely; subjects are modified by verbs towards objects, and that’s the subject of RDF/Triples/SparqL). The constant ever-changing algorithmic AI of search engines makes structured data necessary to precisely make the difference between precisely enhanced SEO, emergent seo as you term it, and ’emergency seo'”

thanks for your post,
Ian

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Caliber Media Group January 12, 2015 at 11:46 am

Thanks to you too, Ian, especially for such a robust comment. So you handle implementations of Automotive Schema, eh? It’ll be interesting to see when the W3C accepts the new & upcoming Vehicle Schema: http://www.dataversity.net/new-schema-org-extension-proposal-automotive-industry/

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Andre Lessner January 14, 2015 at 8:47 am

And, did you folks see that RDF Dataset Normalization Algorithm specs were updated yesterday?
http://json-ld.org/spec/latest/rdf-dataset-normalization/

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Caliber Media Group January 15, 2015 at 6:45 pm

Dear Andre,

Thank you. Yes, we noticed. And, we’ll be keeping “change detection” active for its updates.

Tnx,
Chris

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Caliber Media Group January 16, 2015 at 10:22 am

And, speaking of Knowledge Graphs and Google’s Knowledge Vault, here a jolt of SEO reality today:
“Google’s Knowledge Graph May Show For 1/4th Of All Search Queries”
http://searchengineland.com/googles-knowledge-graph-may-show-14th-search-queries-212962

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Christopher Regan January 23, 2015 at 8:19 am

Speaking of LOD/Linked Open Data:
Jennifer Zaino, who regularly writes for The Semantic Web Blog, notes, on Dataversity…
http://www.dataversity.net/semantic-web-moving-forward-2015/
“Interest in the concepts of the Semantic Web will grow among the business community at large in the upcoming year, says Chris Nelligan, VP and CTO of Dow Jones Professional Information Business, which includes offerings such as Factiva, a product that applies semantic tools to its content set to surface relevant information. Companies are finding greater value in how the technologies within the Semantic Web stack – such as RDF, SKOS, OWL, and SPARQL – can be applied to their specific information needs across content internal and external to their organizations, he says.”

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Caliber Media Group February 19, 2015 at 12:34 pm

JSON-LD: Core Markup video update this week regarding JSON-LD from Manu Sporney:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmvWk_TQ30A&list=TLBECVoPcvKQ8

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Caliber Media Group May 19, 2015 at 11:58 am

May, 2015 update: The Automotive Ontology Working Group just released the Schema.org 2.0 version of the cars section of Schema.org, as part of the “General Automotive Ontology” (GAO) initiative.
More here: https://www.w3.org/community/gao/2015/05/14/automotive-extension-is-now-part-of-schema-org-2-0/

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Caliber Media Group August 5, 2015 at 9:57 am

Update, regarding Automotive Schema: Version 3 of the GAO (Automotive Ontology Working Group) kicked into gear this month. More here:https://www.w3.org/community/gao/
-chris

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Christopher Regan November 9, 2015 at 10:52 am

Schema Version 2.2 released:
http://schema.org/version/2.2/

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Christopher Regan December 13, 2016 at 10:51 am

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161213005684/en/Global-16.06-Billion-Artificial-Intelligence-Deep-Learning
“The market for natural language processing (NLP) is expected to witness fastest CAGR from 2016 to 2022.”

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