Transcript
Page 1: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

THE OWL ANDOntology & SEOThe Hummingbird

Dawn Anderson

Page 2: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

How Can SEO Be Dead?• For Obsessive Compulsive Link Building

Disorder – it may be BUT..• It was NEVER just about the links• It was ALWAYS about ‘ontology’• It’s ALWAYS been about library science,

lexicons, relationships• We still need to ‘search engine optimize’ sites

for this – thinking like a machine (SEO)

Page 3: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Sergey’s Studies

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/

Page 4: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Sergey’s Studies

PICTURE SOURCE: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Brin / Page – Stanford EDU (http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html)

Lexicon – 14 million words in 1998 – if straightforward winner??

Added last in photo-finish

If further info is needed (no clear winner??)

Red and green parts NOT Sergey’s work

Page 5: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

“In computer science and information science, an ontology formally

represents knowledge as a hierarchy of concepts within a domain, using a shared vocabulary to denote the types, properties and interrelationships of those concepts.

Ontologies are the structural frameworks for organizing information and are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering,biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental

to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework. ”

Ontology Definition (InformationScience):

Page 6: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Meanwhile….. In Semantic Web

• People have been busy• The W3C Working Group• Why is it taking so long - decades? (it’s

complicated – using RDF, OWL, XML, SKOS)• The AAA Principle• Always about relationships between

things (entities)• Machines / humans both understanding the

web• Formal Ontologies are key to this• Web of Data was always vision• The ‘Network Effect’ has not yet happened

Page 7: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

What Is OWL?

• Web Ontology Language• Why Not W.O.L. – Why OWL?• “A Semantic Web language

designed to represent rich and complex knowledge about things, groups of things, and relations between things.” (source: W3C.org)

• The W3C chartered the OWL Working Group as part of the Semantic Web Activity in September 2007

Page 8: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Meanwhile….. In SEO• Google Penguin & Panda cause chaos• Hummingbird slips quietly in• Link removal becomes the new link building• ‘Toxic’ links are removed or

disavowed• What to do next???

• A lot of titles get changed on Linkedin• Some even leave SEO• SEO budgets get pulled / reduced ???

Page 9: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

What About The Hummingbird?• A complete rewrite

• Beginning to connect relationships between things (Semantics) – step towards semantic web (lexical onomies – e.g. synonyms)

• Is it a coincidence Penguin and Hummingbird arrived within a short period of each other?

• It didn’t just appear – a lot of work has been going on teaching machines via lexical-semantic ontology learning / natural language processing

– Did Google’s Lexicon get better? Did links matterless because the Lexicon word catalogue got ‘grammar’?? (natural

language)

Page 10: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Meanwhile….. In Content Marketing• Copywriters go crazy with Wordpress WSYWIG editors

….. Everywhere• Fabulous content gets released….

…… Everywhere• With great PR headlines / titles ….

…….. Everywhere• Written for humans …. Not machines (with little or NO SEO)• We begin to drown in a sea of content

• And everybody’s traffic ends up in their blog ;)• Demand for CRO goes through the roof ;)

Page 11: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Meanwhile….. EverywhereWe end up with ‘fuzzy ontologies’

????????????????????????? “A fuzzy ontology is one of vagueness, …. A domain or knowledge representation which is unclear and imprecise in nature as to what it relates to

This exists and ontologists / information scientists work on ways to measure ‘fuzziness’ with measurements of logice.g. 0.6 chance it might mean this

DON’T BE FUZZY

Page 12: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Don’t Be Fuzzy – There Is Another Way

You can write for humans and machines too

Remember Google’s origins in data mining to organise books(library science)

MAKE LIKE A LIBRARY

Page 13: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Is Your Library Organised?

Does It Look Like This?

Page 14: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Is Your Library Organised?

Or Does It Look Like This?

Page 15: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

VocabulariesVery loose and informal

Page 16: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Taxonomies

AnimalMammal

Canine

Feline

HumanReptile

“All About Categories and Subcategories –broad to narrow”

Much more powerful – clear order for crawlers (and people too)

Page 17: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Relationship Ontologies (Knowledge Domain)

Shakespeare

Anne Hathaway

King Lear

Macbeth

UK

England

Scotland

Stratford

Married

Is In

Lived In

Set In

Wrote

Part Of

Part Of

“All About Relationships”

structure AND cross relationships

Page 18: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Avoid Fuzz - When Writing For Web• Write for people AND machines• Googlebot can’t read infographics – put words with them• Don’t dilute your domain ‘theme’ or internal anchor cloud -

Don’t link too many ‘irrelevant’ posts to ‘irrelevant’ posts• Talk about what you do – Obvious (you’d be surprised)• ‘Related content’ CAN be your commercial pages• Check content keywords in GWT (surprised?)• Avoid generics – use a category name in blog post structures

(NOT CATEGORY)• When engaging - Build a subject domain ‘Lexicon’ and weave it

in - Use lexical ‘onomies - synonyms / hyponyms, meronyms, verbs, holonyms, antonyms, associated keywords (Look in GWT content keywords, thesauri, SERPs) - Remember Hummingbird treats synonyms the same so avoid stuffing

Page 19: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Avoid Fuzz - When Writing For Web• Always get primary terms in somewhere• Use relevant lexicon words in H1’s, H2’s, H3’s, image alt tags,

image file names• Get primary keywords and sectional keywords in URLs and titles• Avoid PR headline type titles in your meta title and H1 (riddled

with stop words)• Less is More – It’s all in the hints, clues, site structure (not

stuffing or spinning) Connect ‘relationships’ where possible - Use contextual internal linking as long as it’s RELEVANT

• Don’t use nonsense / generic / irrelevant post tags (you’d be surprised)

• Build taxonomical cluster menus where possible (very powerful)• Build sectional themes in categories (keep it very narrow)

Page 20: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

When Developing For Web• Infinite loops (even in small Wordpress sites) (each churn leaks relevance)• Thin ‘panda vulnerable’ irrelevant content• Incorrectly implemented canonicalization (pages NOT the same)• 301 redirects to irrelevant pages• Dilution through poor use of URL ‘parameters and faceted navigations• Bulk ‘relevance’ together in sections – connect horizontally and vertically -

Use ‘flattish’ silos for strong site sections combined with cross module internal contextual linking

• Build primary keyword presence through boilerplates• Keep things moving – ‘action’ in commercial pages (something that

changes that is HIGHLY relevant to the sectional theme)• Products?? What products? Avoid Generics• All roads eventually lead to commercial targets – most internally linked to• Use breadcrumbs & mega menus but avoid ‘jumble sales’ – look at

conditional / highly related sectional menus (e.g. Widget Logic in Wordpress)

• Name and categorise XML sitemaps, add categories as sites in GWT

Page 21: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Bring It On….. It’s easy to drop the ‘relevance’ ball at the first base through SEO neglect in pursuit of links / content marketing

Exhaust all possibilities via lexical relevance and internal links first then move up

A page beats a page, not a site beats a site

A more ‘relevant’ page will still beat you – even without external links

Because…. Where is the ontology??

Page 22: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Dumb Machines

• Disambiguation - A tomato is a fruit• So a tomato goes in a fruit salad??

Duh• Machines are still a bit stupid

Page 23: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Less Dumb Machines

Page 24: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Irony - Still Quite Dumb Though

Page 25: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Happy Ending

Page 26: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Not So Happy Ending

Page 27: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Don’t Neglect SEOTake it for what it was always meant to be –relationships, domain ontology, library science- Winning on relevance first then getting the final

votes in a photo finish

- Googlebot is still your primary persona (unless you don’t want organic traffic ;))

- Everything affects everything in your site’s‘world’ representation (every word, every internal link, every developer file upload)

Page 28: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

REMEMBER THIS“You can have the best dress in the world….

But if you’re in a dark room with the lights turned off, no-one will see it…”

SEO still counts

“If you build it RIGHT… they will come”

Page 29: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Me@dawieando

Page 30: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Talk In Triples (RDF)SUBJECT PREDICATE OBJECT

Shakespeare Wrote Hamlet

England Is Part Of UK

Brad Pitt Is Married To Angelina Jolie

Page 31: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Use Semantic Relationships (Lexical Onomies)In words and taxonomies (linked and unlinked)

FUNCTIONALITY RELATIONSHIP CONCEPT EXAMPLES

Describing relationships

Synonomy Similarities “buy” and “purchase”, “big” and “large”

Describing relationships

Antonomy Differences (opposites)

“wet” and “dry”

Describing relationships

Hyponomy Specialization “Red is a colour”

Describing relationships

Meronymy Part / Whole “Finger is a meronym of hand”

Describing relationships

Holonymy Whole / Part “Hand is a holonym of finger”

Page 32: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Avoid Fuzz - When Writing For Web• Write for people AND machines• Googlebot can’t read infographics – put words with them• Don’t dilute your domain ‘theme’ or internal anchor cloud - Don’t link too many ‘irrelevant’ posts

to ‘irrelevant’ posts• Talk about what you do – Obvious (you’d be surprised)• ‘Related content’ CAN be your commercial pages• Check content keywords in GWT (surprised?)• Avoid generics – use a category name in blog post structures (NOT CATEGORY)• When engaging - Build a subject domain ‘Lexicon’ and weave it in - Use lexical ‘onomies -

synonyms / hyponyms, meronyms, verbs, holonyms, antonyms, associated keywords (Look in GWT content keywords, thesauri, SERPs) - Remember Hummingbird treats synonyms the same so avoid stuffing

• Always get primary terms in somewhere• Use relevant lexicon words in H1’s, H2’s, H3’s, image alt tags, image file names• Get primary keywords and sectional keywords in URLs and titles• Avoid PR headline type titles in your meta title and H1 (riddled with stop words)• Less is More – It’s all in the hints, clues, site structure (not stuffing or spinning) Connect

‘relationships’ where possible - Use contextual internal linking as long as it’s RELEVANT• Don’t use nonsense / generic / irrelevant post tags (you’d be surprised)• Build taxonomical cluster menus where possible (very powerful)• Build sectional themes in categories (keep it very narrow)

Page 33: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Avoid Fuzz – When Developing For Web• Infinite loops (even in small Wordpress sites) (each churn leaks relevance)• Thin ‘panda vulnerable’ irrelevant content• Incorrectly implemented canonicalization (pages NOT the same)• 301 redirects to irrelevant pages• Dilution through poor use of URL ‘parameters and faceted navigations• Bulk ‘relevance’ together in sections – connect horizontally and vertically -

Use ‘flattish’ silos for strong site sections combined with cross module internal contextual linking

• Build primary keyword presence through boilerplates• Keep things moving – ‘action’ in commercial pages (something that

changes that is HIGHLY relevant to the sectional theme)• Products?? What products? Avoid Generics• All roads eventually lead to commercial targets – most internally linked to• Use breadcrumbs & mega menus but avoid ‘jumble sales’ – look at

conditional / highly related sectional menus (e.g. Widget Logic in Wordpress)

• Name and categorise XML sitemaps, add categories as sites in GWT

Page 34: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Further Reading1. Semantic Web For The Working Ontologist – Dean

Allemang / Jim Hendler2. Studies On The Semantic Web – Perspectives On

Ontology Learning – Jenns Lehmann / Johnanna Volker3. OWL: Representing Information Using The Web Ontology

Language – Lee W Lacy4. Semantic Web Programming – Hebeler, Fisher, Blace,

Perez-Lopez5. Programming The Semantic Web – Segaran, Evans &

Taylor

Page 35: Owl and The Hummingbird - Ontology and SEO

Further Reading1. http://wortschatz.uni-

leipzig.de/~cbiemann/pub/2005/OntoML05proceedings.pdf

2. http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html3. http://searchengineland.com/killer-seo-string-entity-

optimization-1710944. http://www.seobythesea.com/category/fact-extraction/5. http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/421/1/1999-65.pdf6. Fuzzy Ontologies -

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-540-77581-2_10#page-1


Recommended