seo_sherpa - 12:08 pm on May 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

Google acquired applied semantics.
Tim burners lee is espousing the cause of semantic web.
The trend clearly is towards figuring out what the pages mean rather than statistical analysis of the different page elements to arrive at contextual relevance.

To my mind this is where this is going

Google is trying to READ the page for the content. But no, it is not only trying to read the page it is also trying to read the web site (to ensure that the page is not an anomaly but contextually fits in) . This means that henceforth, it will not depend on just the on- page elements to sort out the pages relevance to the user query & its backlinks. It will instead depend on the meaning of those pages.

Welcome to the Brave new world of semantic searching.

Two implications of this for SEO community would be :

Spamming would become extremely difficult for it will not work unless you spam the whole site. Which then is as good or bad as making an altogether different site.

Secondly theme optimizations will become more relevant. Stay on theme, use as broad a set of linguistic terms( key words) or images or audio/video to support that theme.
The web site will be relevant to the SE as well as the end user.

In this light GG comments on the end user conversion being the focal point of optimization, interprets rightly.
He is trying to tell us focus on the searcher. They with their semantic tools want to make his searching relevant. So if we focus on the searcher too our & googles objectives will be coinciding.

Hence this will be the best possible google optimization technique.

We & Google will end up on the same side.