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- I've been in the business, in the web business
and the web technology business right from the start.
I discovered the web in 1994, while I was
working at the European Space Agency,
my background as an aerospace engineer.
And I was totally blown away by what I saw back then,
which was the very primitive version
of the commercial web that we know today.
But I could see things that were coming,
so with my wife Mary, we decided that
it would be worth trying it, and well,
we've been on board ever since.
Very, very early, so I did everything,
and I know everything about the web,
from the underlying transmission technologies, IT,
but very early on I caught onto,
let's say I caught the passion of search.
So I started, I think, my first web optimization
activity was in 97, and there it's been
a continuous and constant progression
towards today, where we are today, here in Billings.
Why is SEO important today?
I think SEO is important, it's important today,
and it will always be important.
There is a constant debate that comes on
every now and again, SEO is dead,
long live SEO, et cetera et cetera,
but it's important because as the amount
of information grows, the amount of pages
increases exponentially, day by day,
we need to focus our attention also
on making our content findable,
and comprehensible, I think those are
the two important things that anybody
who writes something should understand,
because it's not trivial, to index,
to identify, and then to match
what you have to offer, what you have to say,
to what people are actually looking for.
In that respect, in this respect,
SEO is definitely a thing to look at.
Looking at things, is it more important
or is it less important, it's probably more important
because as the amount of information out there
is growing so fast, it becomes more and more competitive,
every area becomes more and more competitive.
So, the more the search agents understand
what you are actually about, what you're talking about,
what products or services you have to offer,
the better idea they have of that, the better chance
you have at having your product, your service,
in front of the right person at the right time.
Looking forward, in the direction where we're going,
there are two buzzwords that are gaining momentum,
and that everybody within the next few months
or at the most one to two years
will have to deal with, and these two words
are AI, and machine learning, artificial intelligence,
and the capacity that machines have to learn.
So we're looking at training, basically, computers,
to understand, and to anticipate,
and learn, basically, off of the experience
that we as people can actually transmit to them.
Now with these things in mind, it becomes important
to be in line with what's happening.
So all of this intelligence and machine learning
rely heavily on the fact that the information
has a common denominator, and has a common way
of being transmitted, and the whole underlying concept
of enabling all of this machine learning
lies in the fact that we provide an additional level,
or layer, if you like, of meta information
that is highly structured, so that we significantly reduce
ambiguity, eliminate uncertainty, and we provide context,
which is something that a machine does not understand.
A machine crunches numbers, machines suck, basically,
at understanding words, understanding
everything that is related to a word.
Words that have different meanings,
so that's the real issue of structured data
also providing that context that people understand,
because the context of a discussion is understood,
or the context of an article is understood.
Machines don't understand, machines understand
what we tell them, if we do not tell them,
they do not understand, which is a big problem
when people write, normally, because it's understood
normally, because there is context,
and so as people we understand, machines do not understand.
Structured data is in fact a sophisticated,
a much more sophisticated, structured data
is basically meta tags on steroids.
So let's be practical with an example.
For the travel industry, images or video are the workhorse.
So they do a lot of work, and they're fundamental
in any aspect of communication for that matter.
So with let's say traditional SEO,
you have an oil tank, and in basically
around 100 characters, you need to put together
so much that it's basically impossible.
So with structured data, we can provide information
about the image, technical aspects of the image
or the video, the location, where it was actually taken,
the person that actually shot it,
and because of all of the properties
that we can attribute to that,
there is a wealth of information
that we can communicate and transmit,
and make available to a search engine
to actually understand everything there is to understand
about that video or that image,
and serve it to the right person at the right time,
because that's what it's all about now.
We're going towards a web of niches,
very very focused, because of all of the traffic,
so I think anybody who wants to be successful
needs to identify an exact niche
where they wanna work, concentrate on that,
and be very focused on that, and they will be successful.
Why should we provide structured data
if the machines are intelligent,
they should understand these things.
Well, the fact is that machines
are not born intelligent, they are born dumb,
they are dumb and they always will be dumb.
They are as intelligent as we train them to be.
We may certainly head towards an era where
we will be able to interact, and machines will understand
natural language as we speak it,
and as we read it, but there's certainly
an interim period of time, five, maybe 10 years,
maybe less, but it also may be more,
where we actually need to foster this process.
And fostering this process means providing
this additional layer of meta information
to make it easier for the machines
to understand what it is that we are trying
to communicate, or offer, provide.
SEO will, moving forward, it's going to become
a more complex operation, I think the future of SEO is
becoming a combination of technical aspects,
so what we're talking about, which is more
on the technical side, less on that of the content creator,
but also related to making it easier to consume
information on behalf of the user.
So user experience is something that
is very much talked about, but rather neglected.
And well of course being the old school man that I am,
I see the benefit in having touched on
many different aspects, the technologies,
the human interface, content creation,
and I think the real added value
is in having all of that experience.
Today there seems to be a fragmentation,
so you have specialists in content,
specialists in lead generation,
specialists in email marketing, et cetera,
maybe wrong, I may be wrong, but I see
an excessive fragmentation in the whole profession,
I think what the end user needs
is not a room full of people who deal with
very specific issues, they need someone
who can give them guidance at a higher level,
and deal with one person who has more generic knowledge.
Yoast is definitely already in the space,
it's doing a decent job, I've seen the plugin
move forward significantly, I think it's okay
for a beginner, and for somebody who does not have
too much, let's say ambition, at least in the start,
they want to get some structured data on their blog,
on their WordPress blog, it is a way to move,
it is not, let's say, completely, let's say, tech free,
in the sense that you need to know nothing about it,
there is still a learning curve,
you need to invest resources and time and studying,
and understanding how this works
for the plugin to be most effective.
But then this goes back to the fact that
it is getting more complex, the whole environment
in which we are working, and it's part of,
let's say, the evolution of the web.
So it was simpler, it's getting more complicated,
or complex, and that's life, isn't it,
it's part of the evolution, so you must adapt.
So the steps for a small and medium enterprise to take
in order to undertake such a task.
To start, I think you need a reliable partner,
an external, or decide to have somebody in house do this.
Not necessarily a programmer, people tend to think
that this is a software issue, when in actual fact
it isn't, you do not need to know any code,
you do not need to be a programmer to do this.
You need some analytical skills,
because what you need to do is
rethink your digital presence, your digital assets,
in terms of what it is exactly about,
and try to create a model of your entire website.
This model is this sophisticated, let's say, metadata,
that we're talking about, so as we mentioned
the meta tags on steroids.
So it's like writing complicated meta tags.
So I think this is really the skill that you would need,
and just start experimenting, start working
on your homepage, look at the different areas,
try to identify little standard procedures
that you can use for different segments,
different categories within your website,
and then start implementing.
You'll make mistakes, everybody does,
but that's the only way to do it, take it step by step.
Google has recently announced at Google I/O 2019
the launch of a new service related to images.
What they are saying is that they are going to feature
high definition images, and to make it
more understandable, they're asking everybody
to provide the images with a JSON-LD file.
This JSON-LD file is then structured data,
where we provide additional information about the image.
So I think that is a pretty strong signal
that we are definitely moving in a world
of meta tags on steroids, if you like.
And if we do this, my experience shows me
that in doing this, Google rewards you
with higher quality in traffic.
There's no doubt about that, this doesn't mean
that you're gonna get more traffic,
you're gonna get more relevant traffic.
So it's like a shop, having thousands of people
walking in front of it, and very few coming in
to purchase something, compared to another one
that has very few people, but one and two walking in,
purchasing something and leaving.
I'm pretty sure that everybody
would find desirable the second situation
and scenario compared to the first.
So implementing structured data comes at a cost.
But there are undoubted benefits
that come from this, and one of them is immediate,
is the change in the keyword profile.
So if the website had some ambiguity issues,
where Google wasn't exactly sure about
what the website was, once this is done
and it's done properly, you'll notice a change
in the profile, so there can be an increase
in keywords, because Google has suddenly understood
what you are actually about, and so will provide
more relevant traffic to you on that specific topic,
and that's a scenario, there could be
another scenario where the ambiguity
was attracting dirty traffic, irrelevant sessions,
so that traffic will disappear,
so your traffic will go down in that case.
But your CTR, your click through rate,
will raise significantly, and that's a great benefit.
And so comparing traditional SEO,
and then adding an additional layer of structured data,
this is something that will definitely happen.
This does not mean that you will
increase your rankings though,
there can be cases where, once all of this has happened,
that you have actually implemented correctly
structured data, you will find that your CTR has gone up,
but you may find that your average position
on some keywords has gone down,
because Google has understood exactly what you are about,
but there are other 250 ranking factors
that are not working in your favor,
and are favoring perhaps your competition.
So you know exactly where you stand,
but at that point then you have to work on other things,
on gaining link popularity, or on making,
creating better content, because the structured data
does not influence what you are saying
or how you are saying that.
Well here at TBEX I'm having a great time,
and I really wish to thank the organization,
and especially Rick Calvert, for inviting me.
It was Rick, talking to Rick over the last year in 2018,
we met because I have organized SMXL in Milano
for three years, and we crossed paths, let's say,
and we had been talking, and I mentioned to Rick
what I had been doing, my activities,
and Rick was very curious to know more about it,
and so I explained, and so rick said hey,
why don't you come over to the next TBEX,
I would like to have you, and have a workshop,
and speak about this stuff, and I said yeah, why not.
And so here we are.
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