Each day people generate a massive amount of content online. Those terabytes of content confound search engines. Yet, search engines have become requisite tools for media consumers and website owners.

Imagine searching for relevant content on the Ides of March. Is it the 15th day of the month, the date when Julius Caesar was assassinated?  Is it the novel by Thornton Wilder? An early 1970s band? The Iron Maiden song from their 1981 Killers album. Is it the season four finale of the television series Xena: Warrior Princess? The list goes on. Most entries on a search engine result page, or SERP, are off the mark.

That is about to change with Web 3.0. Semantic technology aims to teach machines how to focus better on content and relationships.

Website owners can maximize their SEO by making their content clearer for hard-pressed search engines.

Search engines can better understand and present information from your site if you label your content. Each piece of labeled text represents a different type of data to a search engine.

Rich Snippets is a google webmaster tool that anyone with a basic knowledge of XHTML can use to mark up their HTML content in microformats or RDFa. If your site contains structured content or a list such as a restaurant name, an address, or a rating; you can label your content to make it clear.

Semantic tags infuse a bit of intelligence into content. Consider this search result snippet that displays a rating and a price range.

The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide if this restaurant satisfies their search. Google currently supports reviews, people profiles, business listings and events.

Search engines are also becoming smarter. With the leap into Web 3.0, search engine technology will play a starring role. Companies like Envi and Textdigger are offering those advancements to website owners in the form of widgets.

Envi is using semantics to improve the search experience by structuring data from unstructured content.

Will Hunsinger, CEO of Evri, says “Evri widgets make it easy for readers to browse articles, images and video about the subject of their choice, or the content of any post or article.” Evri has a gallery of free contextual widgets and topic-based widgets.

The Popover widget is tucked into a small button below each post. Clicking expands it into a dynamic view of related content.

Evri’s topical widgets capture the conversation around a topic or theme. The Sentiment widget analyzes and summarizes the positives and the negatives about what’s being said on the web about a topic or person such as Martin Scorsese’s film. You can also filter the results to focus on a specific connection.

Hunsinger says Evri relieves the consumer of the burden of finding the content that is meaningful to them and then getting that content in a preferred format or on a device such as an iPhone.

Textdigger.com provides a semantic content tagger, a semantic topic creator and a semantic SEO tool. The SEO tool analyzes the content on your website. In the online tour, the tool analyzes a company website that sells baby gates. The website lacked words that people use to talk about safety products. The tool recommends contextually relevant terms to use such as: injury, fireplace, guard, metal, protecting, excellent, restrict, pen, emergency room, pregnancy, play and hurt.

Textdigger wants to make online research less of a nightmare. The company will soon launch a semantic web-search tool called digger.com. Tim Musgrove, CEO, demonstrated the tool with planning a special trip.  My mother is celebrating her 80th birthday this year and my sister and I want her to have a unique, memorable vacation.

Musgrove used digger.com to do a semantic web search for blog posts on unique, memorable travel experiences. The key is to disambiguate alternative senses of words as the example shows.  The control panel posts queries so you can disambiguate, or clarify the meaning, of each word in your search.

“Digger.com is a different kind of web search tool. Rather than having to carefully craft the words used to search for content on the Web, Digger.com presents you with reasonable variations of your query,” says Musgrove. “It analyzes the context and relationships of the words in your search query to the content on the Web.” The tool, which is in beta, presents relevant sites on the search engine results page (SERP) that other search engines might bury. He calls digger.com a power users’ research tool.

Web 3.0 is the semantic web with search engines listening algorithmically to the most important conversations on the Web. Websites will also be built based on user function; i.e.; how people prefer to use your website.

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