Jarno van Driel: Semantics, Accessibility, and SEO – Episode 168

Content Strategy Insights

Jarno van Driel Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web. Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability. When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org, and other semantic practices, and he is to this day one of the most respected practitioners of this craft. We talked about: how he arrived at his work at the intersection of semantics, accessibility, and SEO his early introduction to the importance of accessibility in content work his surprise and curiosity about how his small primary school websites were outranking big commercial websites how now-common practices like on-page navigation helped his SEO efforts 20 years ago how he discovered semantic metadata by reading Drupal documentation the dearth of ontology guidance and syntax documentation in the early days of semantic markup how semantic markup started to take of with the introduction of Google's knowledge graph the small early communities that formed around semantic search how the arrival of Google's knowlege graph filled gaps the ability to disambiguate entities, especially in multilinqual contexts his take on the notion of the Semantic Web the evolution of his work over the past 10 year from getting rich search results to actually structuring meaningful websites how well-structured, properly marked-up webpages can deliver better results for a company, even when the page gets fewer visits the importance of focusing on messaging and content over technical markup if you want to be found on the web Jarno's bio Jarno van Driel is an international Structured Data and technical SEO consultant. He started his career in 1998, during the early years of the web as a print and web designer, Flash and 3D artist, frontend developer, and accessibility engineer. Jarno has continuously embraced new and challenging roles throughout his career to become a well-rounded digital professional. Jarno's activities can be categorized and classified in many different taxonomies and ontologies. Yet labeling Jarno's job title is a near impossible task because his activities overlap with a multitude of departments and specialists. An ambiguous state, because of which most simply know him as 'just Jarno', that structured-data fanboy from Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Jarno became fascinated with the 'semantic web' when he discovered something called 'semantic metadata' (2008). Semantic annotations piqued Jarno's interest because of his background in web accessibility, which is about expressing structure and meaning. Structured data markup takes things to a whole other level, making it the obvious path ahead. As an early adopter of linked open data, his work was mentioned in several W3C discussion groups. Mentions for which Jarno is very grateful because it would lead him to start publicly participating in schema.org (2013). Through this, Jarno met and learned from many of the pioneers who are at the forefront of the semantic technologies being used today. Connect with Jarno online LinkedIn Twitter Mastodon Bluesky Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ger2EZbg3g0 Podcast intro transcript This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 168. We all want our content to be found on the web. It's always been the case that that's easier said than done. Jarno van Driel discovered early on that focusing on accessibility and usability would give his clients better visibility in search results. When semantic markup was introduced so you could add metadata to HTML pages, he found that he could do even more to help search engines understand web content - and to help his clients get better business res...