Submitted by pgraber on November 22, 2005

There is a growing and emerging disclipline on the web that integrates SEO activities into the overall enterprise. Mulitdiscipline. Think of it as holistic SEO.

I'm currently reading a new book titled 'Ambient Findability' (O'Reilly). It is a book on the deeper aspects of human wayfinding and written by Stephen Moorse. Its quite an interesting read - although a little long on high level views and abstraction. But he brings up some profound concepts to think about in relation to the future of finding information in a digital world.

The basic premise of the book is that digital data will only increase and with it, findability of what you are looking for (at the right time) will become increasingly difficult. This is in part due to the very nature of the 'technology' that allows us to communicate - language.

Since language can be quite subjective (the same words have multiple meanings; as contexts change, meanings sometimes change with them), findability will always be challenging.

All of this got me to thinking as much about the basic optimization practices on page, as well as them from an architectural standpoint. What if a CMS used this sort of concept with url structures? It could be the basis of better search on site.

What if content development centered around spheres of keywords, and as Morville pointed out, that mutli-disciplinary teams worked in tandem to generate textual-based mappings of the products, the orgnanization, ect?

Morville did get a bit out there. While it certainly wasn't a 'how-to' book, it got you thinking. Especially how some of the higher-level stuff like RDF, ontologies and stuff like that.

Update - 12/06/05
Well, what's very interesting is my point about 'keyword webs' and 'spheres of keywords' is actually known at 'latent semantic indexing (LSI)' What LSI basically does is consider a site's copy in relation to other site's that have used similar phases, keywords, etc. Basically it's a more downline approach that considers other resources and how your content relates to that 'standard'. Its latent.

A very interesting thing about my thoughts on this is that I've pondered this well before I even heard of a local interactive company that is promoting the concept. It's being promoted by a bigtime thought-leader in the SEO field. There language has given my concept a bit more structure.

A quick search on the topic found this excellent article:
http://research.nitle.org/lsi/lsa_definition.htm

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