What is the Semantic Web?
To easily understand what Semantic Web is, I have put it into simple terms. The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given a well defined meaning to better enable computers and people to corporate with each other. The Semantic Web really has two basic elements which hare taxonomy and ontology.
Taxonomy in its simplest form means the “arrangement of things”. Ontology is a set of concepts or categories in a subject area or domain which shows their properties and the relations between those properties.
What is Ontology in relation to search engines?
In the past, if you wanted to rank on Google then a typical process would be have a member of staff at your company or a copywriter write a piece of content, sprinkle in a few keywords, publish it on your site and then sit back and wait for Google to crawl your site with a hope of it being added to the SERPs.
No longer is this the case, whilst sprinkling keywords into your text is useful, you still need to manage the basic SEO but this is where Ontology becomes relevant.
Now you know the meaning of Ontology (as explained above), when creating your content pieces, you need to be able to showcase all of your knowledge about categories, concepts, properties that relate to each other. This also involves ensuring that you have the correct entities on your page and that you have a solid internal linking structure to show search engines the relevance between your content pages.
The more knowledge you can offer to your users, the more the search engines will understand your in-depth knowledge and in turn will rank you accordingly for the product or services you offer.
SEO Ontology and how it can help.
Whilst doing a thorough keyword analysis through relevant keyword tools and Google Search Console is extremely useful, you really need to dig deeper, understand who your target audience is, incorporate structured data and ensure you have the niche entities on your page and make sure those entities and entity associations are close to each other and connected. Connecting entities to each other within a context is a practical application of SEO ontology. This will help Search Engines clearly understand that your are knowledgeable in a given subject.