#SemanticEngineering is just good old fashioned Search Engine Optimization dressed in a new suit
Within the Search Engine Optimization Industry there have been so many changes during the last few years that one's head will spin irrationally. It has thus become very difficult to explain what exactly it is that those of us who practise the deceptively difficult art of Search Engine Optimization actually do, especially when one of us steps into your marketing campaigns as a consultant, coz you want the top search engine spot.
So there is plenty of history around describing how we, as search engine optimization tactitians got to where we are now in 2021. There was even a public perception management campaign pushing the story that SEO IS DEAD ( #SEOISDEAD ) Do a little research around that topic for yourself, but think of Semantic Engineering and the new machine learning tactics used by search engines to build data bases around digital entities and each digital entities connectedness to specific topics and information themes, storing this information in many formats.
Knowledge graphs and entity connectedness maps are just some of the new semantic engineering tools used by search engines in evaluating the semantics of your online assets, or the Semantics of a search query.
The SEO INDUSTRY is still trying to figure most of these new Semantic search tactics used by search engines, and one does need to be awear of the black hat search engine optimization tactics that activate punishment algorithms which may have your digital assets removed from all search engines.
Most of the history within the semantic engineering landscape is good and can be relied on as data to plan your way forward, but some is just pure poison that will destroy your online reputation and have your online assets removed from most search indexes within days.
Within the world of SEMANTIC ENGINEERING or good old fashioned Search Engine Optimization, Following best practices from the past may not be the best thing to do, coz some folks tried to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs, (read #BlackHat SEO ), so the big giant ( read GOOGLE ) cooked the goose, whafting the delicious smell through the interwebs and chased all those who asked for a piece out of town ( read introduction of algorithmic penalty for cheaters)
Now as with any engineering, like civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, new processes, tactics and procedures are always an issue, so reading, networking, researching and experimentation with new equipment and techniques is always needed to stay on top of your game.
More than 90 % of an SEO TACTITIAN or SEMANTIC ENGINEER's time is spent doing research and experimentation, testing search results. About five percent of our time is spent in meetings, 2 % discussing tactics with co-workers and the rest arranging your work flow issues needed to get the attention of search engines.
Now doing your physical SEO WORK is not something that a semantic engineer would do personally, but giving your marketing team a written guideline and set of instructions on what physically needs to be done is the job of a SEMANTIC ENGINEER. In other words, a semantic engineer establishes a set of processes and procedures that your marketing team needs to implement as a team of committed individuals, all working on different aspects of ensuring that your intended target market audience -
A) find your online content within the SERP's or Search Engine Results Pages
B) select your link from those offered by the search engine in their SERP
C) consume your content then click on your desired call to action statement within your online assets.
Things like writing code to perform data base actions using an end users information to calculate answers such as foreign exchange calcs, or shipping costs is not done by a semantic engineer, but rather by specialists in these fields such as a data base technician or python coding specialist.
Semantic engineers connect the dots between you online assets and search engines indexed pages through a vast array of avenues, so that search engines may make a semantic match between your online assets and an end users search query.
This is no easy task, and it is becoming increasingly difficult, as the search engines are using ever better algorithms to understand both the search query and your online assets purpose and intentions.
Remember that purpose and Intentions form the core of all communications, so how will you convey this to search engines so that they may use this in a meaningful way? You thus need a semantic engineer to engineer the semantics of your online content to suit both user intent ( read your actual online audience ) and general search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo or Google.
So semantic engineers are just well qualified Search Engine Optimization Tactitians, who use many different avenues both online and offline to do proper search engine optimization.
Remember that your intended online audience needs some help in forming their search query, so that your intended target audience types your desired #KEYWORDS or semanticaly similar phrases into the search box or their search query.
This tricky piece of physcological manipulation of your intended online audience thinking patterns and thought processes, is just good old fashioned marketing. Here semantic engineers arrange things like radio talk shows, road side bill boards, flyers, marketing brouchers, magazine and newspaper advertising that connects your desired target market audience with your social media and other online assets. The reason here is to put the semantics of your online assets in to the thinking patterns and thought procedures of your intended target market audience and hopefully when your off line audience goes online to search, they will use your semantics.
THE RESULT !!! a semantic match between the search query and your online assets.
Successful semantic engineering is a daunting task. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a multi disciplined task and requires huge amounts of team work between many different departments, many of them not even directly involved with website creation, use or maintenance.
A good definition of SEO is quoted here
start quote ***
Search Engine optimisation is all the work done by your marketing team and their various partners to ensure that your intended target market audience
1) find your online content in the Search Engine Results Pages
2) choose your online content from the provided Search engine Results Page
3) consume your online content and perform a Call To Action within the page discovered in the SERP's.
End quote ***
So a brief one sentence answer to the Question "what is semantic engineering " would be -
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Semantic Engineering is the implementation of Search Engine Optimization tactics in both the online and offline envionments.
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