5 Questions About Semantic SEO

Earlier this month, I attended the SemTechBiz2013 conference in San Francisco. This is a gathering of creators and designers of the semantic tech stack, folks who work on semantic web standards, and representatives from the search engines, all coming together to discuss the state of the industry. There was a focus on semantic search and structured data markup at the show, reflecting the expansion of schema.org and Google Knowledge Graph as well as Bing Snapshots and the growing influence of the Open Graph Protocol.

Aaron Bradley wrote up a fantastic list of key takeaways from the conference, and if you're attempting to get your head around semantic search, it's a great starting point. Blatant plug alert: I'll be talking about how to strategically adjust for these shifts in my talk at MozCon in early July.

Marketers have a laundry list of activities to choose from to increase visibility, build brand, and drive engagement. It can be tough to quantify when to work on the hot new thing, especially when the words "Google" and "SEO" are prominently involved. When there are fundamental shifts in the SEO landscape (and I believe we're near the beginning of one of these shifts), search industry practitioners are often asked how to organize a strategy around the new tactical options. Here are five questions that I hope clarify the current state of semantic SEO and structured data markup:

1. Is "Semantic SEO" a new term?

2. What do "entity-based search results" look like now?

3. So is the keyword dead?

4. Is structured data markup a ranking factor?

5. Will implementing schema.org markup actually hurt our search engine visibility in the future?

Bonus question: What's the best move for web publishers?