Taken from my presentation at the latest Brighton SEO conference.

As we move from an industrial civilisation to an information civilisation we are spoilt with choice, but with the multitude of options that the proliferation of digital technologies has presented to us are we still being restricted by omniscient authors we often don’t even consider.

Let’s reflect on the links that many of us are in the practice of building. Inbound hyperlinks are important as a vote of confidence, and this isn’t going to change any time soon. In fact, they will only become more important and the actual quality of the link will become ever more prevalent too. At the start of any SEO campaign we perform some extensive keyword research, which we then refine down to a limited number of recommended keywords to target for that client. No pun intended but the key words in that sentence being ‘limited number’ – optimizing your clients’ landing page is the first phase in restricting other users’ semantic understanding of the terms.

“We are asked to follow pre-programmed, objectively existing associations.” (Manovich pg. 61)

Manovich argues that by following hyper-links we are following someone else’s pre-meditated path through the information, but frequently the user mistakes these connections as their own and we continually follow externalized thought processes, gradually narrowing our own natural associative powers.

If we take a client in the health industry for example, who’ve got gyms all across the UK, they’re going to want to optimize for keywords such as ‘gym’ ‘health club’ and maybe ‘exercise’ and ‘fitness’ but when we think of the word ‘health’all sorts of associations spring to mind – sport, types of sport, nutrition, balanced diets, green, personal, mental, physical, hospital, doctors, fast food, illness, fruit. The practice of anchor text makes sense in the realms of SEO but could be destructive in the grander scheme of things.

In decades time, I’m talking hover boards and holidays to Mars, our children’s children are going to grow up immersed in digital technology, the web will provide a second life so ubiquitous and integrated it will not be considered secondary at all. In this potential future the generations will spend so much time online following links that they’ll increasingly mistake the connections for their own. Their understanding of semantic relationships may be narrowed and word association games will become very, very brief. However as digital technologies advance, so will our methods of linking the vast amounts of data on the World Wide Web. How we interact with computation will develop and hyperlinks will not be the only way of navigating through information. With products like John Underkoffler’s G-Speak our Minority Report moment may have arrived.

Posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 at 11:06 am in SEO, Semantic Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.