Drupal For Marketing

# RDF
How the Semantic Web will boost your
SEO

by Fintan Galvin,
White Label Development
 About me - Business
● Owner of the IO1 Group
● White Label Development (www.white-label.biz)
– Dedicated to working with marketing companies

● IO1 (www.io1.biz)
– Largest Drupal company in UK
– Major sponsor for Drupal community
● CVS, Testing.drupal.org, etc.
– Primary sponsor for RDF in Drupal 7
– Semantic web Fanatics
– Large-scale SEO experts
 About me - Personal
● 10 years promoting the Semantic Web
to anyone that would listen
● Sun Tzu student
● Geek
 The Semantic Web

A web aimed at machines, not people.

What is the Semantic Web?
 Simply put.......
● The Semantic Web allows us to
– Explicitly provide information about stuff
on websites so that software (e.g. A
search engine) does not have to guess at
what you meant when you wrote it
– Provide intelligent links between stuff on
the web
 Wind - a common problem

I go out for a stroll on a breezy day and as I wind my

way along, I feel the wind in my face.
This sets my mind thinking about how to improve the
way that people wind up companies when they fall on
their face?
Recently I was involved in the wind up of a company
that was involved in making gears for wind up clocks.
 Example without RDFA

What the users see :

I stayed in the Paris Hilton and met Paris Hilton.

What the search engines see :

<p>I stayed in the Paris Hilton and met Paris
Hilton.</p>
 Example with RDFA
What the users see :

I stayed in the Paris Hilton and met Paris Hilton.

What the search engines see :

<p>I stayed in the <span property="vcard:Locality">
Paris</span><span typeof="vcard:Organization">
Hilton</span> and met <span typeof="foaf:Person"
property="foaf:name">Paris Hilton</span>. </p>
 Current Status
● Widespread adoption of ● Semantic publishers
– RDFa – Yahoo
– Microformats – US Gov
– FOAF – Cnet
– SIOC – Reuters
– GEO – Twitter
– etc. – Dbpedia
– Digg
– Kelkoo
– Etc
– http://esw.w3.org/topic/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenData/DataSets
 Imagine how much content I can generate from these datasets!

http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/lod-datasets_2009-07-14_colored.png
 Who's making money ?
● Freebase ● Professional services
● Tripit ● Usage
● Wolframalpha ● Enterprise versions
● Travelocity ● Sales
● Bing ● Advertisement
● Swotti ● Affiliate
● Google ● Advertisement
● Panasonic ● Product Advisor
 What it means to SEs
● Stop the guess-work / Return better results
● Build more intelligent link graphs
● Potential for major blackhat issues
● Directly compete with companies
– Business networks (Linkedin)
– Directories / Comparison sites
– Geo based services
– E-commerce sites
– Social networks
– You?
 What do you get
● Rich snippets
● More targeted traffic
● Easier to analyse competitors
● Easier to integrate data from external sources
● Easier to share data
● A chance to grab an advantage
 SEO

Getting to No. 1
 What is SEO
● The ability to get your content to the top of search
engine listings
– “Drupal semantic web experts”
– Yes, it’s tooooo easy to rank for long tail, bringing in
quality issues for Search Engines
 SEO Breakdown
● On-Site SEO
● Off-site SEO
● Content tools
● Competitive / Market Research
 On-site SEO - Overview
● Now ● Next
– Words used – As before
– Page structure – Meaning of words
● HTML used
● URLs – Site structure
● etc ● Expressed
relationships between
entities
 On-site SEO :
What we give search engines
● Now ● Next/Now
– Robots.txt – Robots.txt
– sitemap.xml – sitemap.xml
– RDFA
– RDF
– Microformats
 HTML + RDFa
● HTML ● RDFA
– For users – For Computers
– Structure – Structure
information for information for
viewing processing
● H1 ● DC
● Bold ● FOAF
● UL ● SIOC
● etc ● etc
 On-site : How to Win
● Add semantic information to your data
● Adopt Early (well maybe not early, but don't be any later!)
● Get RDFA and microformats on your pages ASAP
● Realise that opening your data up is critical
– Data silos are losing value
– Make sure you know what people can do with your data
● USE STANDARDS
– Google et al don't know about your internal standards
– You don't have the time, you need to be focused on
developing points of difference
● USE DRUPAL ;-)
 Off-Site SEO
● Now ● Next
– Link Text – As before
– No. of links – SE will know
exactly the
– Who links are
context of links
from
– Links express
– SE guess context
relationships
of links

<link about="[_:W3C]"
rel="foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf" href="http://www.w3.org/" />
Off-site SEO : Old links
Off-Site SEO : Intelligent links
 Off-site : How to Win
● Promote your data's availability
– To search engines
– To people who are creative
– Constantly push to have your data integrated into other sites
● Make it easy for people to use semantic references to your data
● Create semantically rich sites focused on niches
● Figure out how your site can be a partner in a niche i.e. what
can you provide to others in the niche or outside your niche
● Think in terms of people creating web applications rather than
web sites
● USE DRUPAL ;-)
 Content Tools
● Now ● Next
– Micro sites – All that just got
deployments
easier
– Rapid Site
deployments – Rapid adoption of
new niche
– Re-purposing data
standards
– External data
Integration – Be able to give
– Content Distribution and take semantic
data
 Content Tools : How to Win
● Use a CMS that can produce/consume semantic data
● Have well established data structures with mappings to open
standards
● Have well defined templates for publishing semantic data
● Start by adding any site wide elements you can
● Ensure all pages provide at least some semantic data
– e.g. DC.TITLE, DC.CREATOR
● Speed
– Ensure that you have the capabilities to rapidly deploy new
content in any format needed
● USE DRUPAL ;-)
 Competitive research tools
● Now ● Next
– Link research – As before
– WHOIS / IP – Complex link
– Simple link graphs graphs
– Simple tools – Complex in-house
and online tools
– Online services
– Semantic content
analysis
Competitive research - How to
Win
● Start building / using semantic tools now
● Build tools that aggregate semantic data from
as wide a variety of sources as possible
● Index and monitor your competitors’ sites for
semantic data
● Monitor social data on individuals in
competitors
● Use DRUPAL ;-)
Drupal
 What is Drupal
● A framework and an application (according to
Dries)
● A web application framework (according to me)
● A semantic content platform (definitely)
● A community
State of Drupal7 + RDF
● Agreed final D7 features
in Paris
● Extended deadline for
rdf in D7
● IO1 stepped up to the
plate and sponsored
Scor to get it done
● Scor Delivered
My favourite commit
 Why to use Drupal
● It’s dedicated to the Semantic Web
● It’s incredibly flexible / scalable
● Drupal 7 is essentially a Semantic Web
publishing framework
● Views & Feed API Module brings
Drupal's semantic capabilities to a
whole new level
● It’s way ahead of the competition
 How long do you have?
● It’s 9pm and someone just told you
about the party that started at 8pm,
how quick can you join in
● It will buzz over the next 12-18 months
● Still time....
– 6 – 9 months to still grab advantages over
competitors
 Parting thought
● The semantic web will move the end
points
– Now it’s filtered by destination
– In future it will be filtered by trust
Q&A
 THANK YOU!!

Contact Details:
fintan@io1.biz
Twitter: @suncao
Blog: http://www.io1.biz/blog/