Businesses become sucessful by meeting expectations. When a product or a service which is in demand is supplied to a satisfactory standard, things tick over.
Great business surpass expectations. They provide a better product or service, a lower price, or better customer service. Great businesses thrive, become market leaders, and drive their industries. In order to do this, they must understand the needs and values of their customers.
Search Engines just don’t understand
Search engines fail in this regard. No matter how intelligent their technology is, they cannot extract human value from raw data. Without an understanding of the difference between good and bad, the ability to interpret user comments into positive or negative feedback, an understanding the semantic value of a voting charts, star ratings and so on, they lack the fundamental ability to understand the way in which a human user feels about subject, and so they’re limited to simply examining data. Without that understanding, they can’t provide unexpected insights, dig deeper, and surpass expectations.
But what if they could? Imagine a search engine which could intelligently understand the intent behind your search, and provide results tailored to meet your needs. Some search engines already do this to a small extent – they interpet your search query based on historical and trending data to make guesses at what you’re searching for. This is limited, however, and still fails to achieve the fundamental level of understanding required to make the leap to surpassing expectations.
This might be about to change. The way in which we develop websites the internet is evolving, and search engines could cross the threshold into actually understanding, to an extent, the human value of data.
The Semantic Web
With the hype about ‘Web 2.0′ and social media changing the way that we use the internet, there’s a fundamental shift going on behind the scenes which is going largely unnoticed.
As the internet as a whole matures, new standards and best practices emerge and evolve, the most impacting of which is undoubtedly the evolution the the Semantic Web. By using a standardised approach, website developers can ‘tag’ content in to allow search engines to classify information.
By tagging things like names, addresses, reviews, and events in a consistant, intelligent manner, search engines can begin to classify and understand the human value we attribute to them. We can provide a way to convey values, relationships and semantic content of data, and search engines can use this to begin to actually understand the nature of the content they’re looking at. Search engines will begin to understand the information they read.
Is your website ready for the semantic shift?
Semantic search is going to play a huge part of SEO in the very near future. By ensuring that your details, events and points of contact with the community are correctly structured, you could ride the tide of the next evolution of the internet.
Websites with well structured, semantic information will rank higher, and perform better.
If you’d like to find out more, we encourage you to contact us, or to request a free website assessment to find out how well equipped you are for the semantic shift.
