I’m not sure what’s the problem with my RSS feed link–it seems like a character set problem.

As for your second comment, my theme is mentioned on the bottom of every page–it’s Regulus by Binary Moon.

I’m thinking there’s maybe another dimension that lines up with your generations. Thats the evolution from Web 1.0 to 2.0 to (maybe) 3.0.

With 1.0 content is static and indexing is pretty simple. With the RIAs of web 2.0 it seems to me that the whole problem gets much more difficult, both for the Search Engine and the Optimizer. In my own case for example most of the action takes place inside a Flash player on the page with data hidden away. This makes machine annotation of the surrounding HTML much more important. Have you any thoughts on this?

As to the Semantic web, maybe again there’s a parallel to SEO 3.0. When everything is rdf, the linking *is* the data!

Tony

PS As an aside (or maybe a separate point), there’s also the advent of widget proliferation. With my content in an embedded widget pointing back to my site, do I get a leg up on back link generation?

Yes, you can bolt on all kinds of enhancements to existing systems and, in the case of outsourced/hosted services as your example above suggests, you can have these be fairly sophisticated. You can undoubtedly get some value this way but you’ll create friction at the edges. Your comment already identified one potential issue: added workflow to validate externally-provided content enhancements. Also, you correctly point out that the the added meta-data won’t help you necessarily with on-site search unless you make the processed/enhanced content what your search engine indexes. Last but not least, an outsourced provider may have a hard time helping you with back links in a legitimate and truly value-added way as opposed to something that search engines may consider an attempt to beat the system.

As you can imagine – I am quite interested in SEO 2.5/3.0… that is the automated metadata / link creation.

You mentioned that this can’t / shouldn’t be a bolt-on to an existing publishing system. I am not sure I totally follow… On an enterprise system, couldn’t I (relatively) simply add a step to the publishing process that sent (via web service or similar) my content and structured metadata (I’d still want to manage that internally) to a third party provider – then the provider could mark it up with links and provide me back some nicely formatted XML that could be parsed and added back into the CMS before moving to the next step in the process?

In larger organizations (non-UGC) – I am thinking that I would still need a way to sanitize the return links / metadata – as this automated process would still be susceptible to age old problem of: out of context, inappropriate and potential damaging content/links.

While the above process would defiantly help me with SEO, It wouldn’t really help me with on-site search and/or content reporting. I’d still need a way to manage the structured portion of the metadata (which we use for on-site search, automated outbound feeds and for reporting on which types of content Is popular) – which still would require manual intervention and is prone to error…

Jon

As a business strategist more than technologist nowadays, I would like to see similar logic around the ‘Input’ socket of the SEO process: why we optimise, what traffic we want to drive (to where) and what we intend to do with such traffic? It is obvious that different intent (mass e-commerce v/s opinion-influencing socio-political blog, v/s niche b2b offering etc) would call for different approaches, models and generations of SEO (or their priority in the mix). IMHO today’s understanding of the reasons for SEO is rather simplistic and narrow, even among successful practitioners of all 3 generations.

Do the SEO ‘gurus’ (or their automated Frankenstein optimisers) ever ask the business leaders any of the above questions, or assume an ‘obvious’ answer like ‘..because you want to sell more, don’t you?..’

Just some more FFT but keenly looking forward to Part III, this is a seminal piece – thanks!