Matt Cutts is the head of the Google Webspam Team, and for a long time has been the lead evangelist/spokesperson for Google and their products via his blog.   I tuned in today to see if I could glean anything new and stumbled on a recent repost of the state of the index speech from Pubcon 2009.

Some great tips about using the Google Wonder Wheel for keyword research, cool developer tools and  (most importantly in my mind) verbal confirmation that Meta Keywords aren’t used by Google for anything (yay!).  I admit that it’s been so long since I’ve seen a picture of Matt I didn’t know he shaved his head. I’m thinking that he’s starting to look like Jeremy Schoemaker.  Check out the computer generated rendering above.

I won’t rehash the whole thing as Matt has done a great job of articulating the finer points.  It’s worth a watch, because if I learned something – it’s almost certain that you will too.

I don’t want to sound like a nerd, (ok, maybe I do), but I was just reading a paper called ‘tagging human knowledge’ by Paul Heymann, Andreas Paepcke, Hector Garcia-Molina.  Because I’ve been speaking recently about categorization and taxonomy and their importance in defining relationships of things, I completely neglected tagging as a viable method of organization.  I didn’t forget about it, but I didn’t think it was as reliable as a system organized by taxonomy experts and librarians.

From the abstract

A fundamental premise of tagging systems is that regular users can organize large collections for browsing and other tasks using uncontrolled vocabularies. Until now, that premise has remained relatively unexamined. Using library data, we test the tagging approach to organizing a collection. We find that tagging systems have three major large scale organizational features: consistency, quality, and completeness.

In addition to testing these features, we present results suggesting that users produce tags similar to the topics designed by experts, that paid tagging can effectively supplement tags in a tagging system, and that information integration may be possible across tagging systems.

The conclusion?  In a nutshell, organizing content by tagging works as well  (if not better) than organizing content using library systems.  Furthermore, it turns out that non qualified, non-paid individuals were just as effective at organizing content ans librarians and taxonomists.

I used to think that tagging wouldn’t work, just because there were too many random factors when you ask a person without knowledge of a thing to categorize a certain thing (that’s what tagging is, essentially) and couple it with financial motives.  I still think commercial applications of tagging are too open to manipulation, but it’s good to know that the system works.

Applications for tagging in SEO

So here’s where I decide to start using tagging more effectively on Harbour City SEO.  Play along at home if you like.

1st.  Go to delicious.com.  Type in the main keyword you’re targeting into their search box.  I did “SEO”.  Then I look at the first page of results.  All of the sites on there are ones I’m familiar with and pace a certain amount of trust with, so I take down the details of the tags I see them using.

2nd.  Take the common occurrences of tags and put them aside.  I eliminated any tags that only occurred once.

3rd.  Take the remaining list of tags and insert them into your tag structure if you’re using WordPress or another CMS that supports tagging.  If you’re not using a system with built in tagging capabilities, make sure the keywords are somewhere on your page.

This is the list I came up with:

• google
• keywords
• marketing
• ranking
• reference
• search
• seo
• tips
• tools
• webdesign

I’ll be sure to include those tags for my SEO strategy, as they should help increase relevance for my topics and usability for visitors.  Sweet sassy molassey, I’m excited to finally be using tags with confidence.  How about you, are you ready?

The semantic web is coming.  Tim Berners Lee, the “father of the internet”  describes it in this article in Scientific American.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users.

Clear as mud right?  I’ve been putting together scraps and pieces of information for some time trying to understand exactly what it all means.  I wasn’t able to describe it, or what I thought it was, for years.  Not to myself and not to others.

A few weeks ago I had my ‘eureka’ moment.  I think I was driving to work, maybe I was in the shower (those are places my ‘eurekas’ commonly occur) and I figured it all out.  Rather than interpreting our queries and providing the results it thinks are best, the semantic web will understand our queries and provide the results we need, knowing what we meant not interpreting what we said.  Right?  I think so anyway.

Wolfram Alpha is at the forefront of this new understanding with it’s computational knowledge engine.  Google and Yahoo!?  They’ve made strides and efforts at truly understanding, but have fallen short or failed completely.

Google has, supposedly, incorporated latent semantic indexing into it’s algorithm.  Yahoo! tried tagging by incorporating del.icio.us tags into search results.  Neither, in my opinion, improved search results to the point where Google or any major search engine are able to understand the meaning of a query, or the relationships of words in a specific context.

Oh, I suppose they’ve made improvements and progress here and there.  Fundamentally though, there’s something missing.  Allow me to ’splain.

I’m optimizing my own site.  Makes sense, I’m an SEO guy, I want the brass ring.  I don’t use black hat stuff, not because it’s wrong but because I don’t know how.  Now, I know, and I think you know, that the following phrases all mean the same thing.

SEO Nanaimo
Nanaimo SEO
Search Engine Optimization Nanaimo
Nanaimo Search Engine Optimization
SEO Nanaimo BC
etc…

I would go on, but I don’t want to get accused of keyword stuffing.  So, as I was saying, we all know that the above phrases are the same.  Google doesn’t though.  I have to target each phrase individually in Google as the results for each query are different.  It’s the same players, ultimately, just in a different order.

For you, the small business, it means you have to choose wisely.  If you have a small site, say only 5 or 10 pages, you’ll have some hard choices to make.   You can blog (like I do) which is a good way to create relevance.  You can do major link building campaigns and target various terms through your anchor text, since Google still relies heavily on links to decide relevance (not as much as before though) or you can build more content for your site.

You could also let sleeping dogs lie and pick one term that represents the best opportunity.   Need help with that?  No problem, drop me a line for free advice on your current keyword strategy.