Jason Barnard at Digital Olympus 2019
Jason Barnard talks about The Google Cookbook - Making Content Easy to Digest
Google’s food is information. It needs to identify, collect, chew, swallow and digest in order to be able to give the answers to users. We look at leveraging Schema.org markup, Dom extraction, semantic triples, tables and lists to prepare Google’s food. We meander through a lot of questions and come up with some interesting explanations. Schema markup is like recipes and food items (that analogy doesn’t fly for very long). When you rebuild your site, start with thinking about structured data, since that encourages us to better organise categories, pages, and even Fraggles. I realise that I have been saying that I am a double bass. Alex gives me a taste of my own medicine by asking a question I wasn’t ready for. I wriggle through by quoting Jono Alderson and Cindy Krum – chunks, blocks and Fraggles. I cite so many people, it is starting to feel that I don’t have much to say for myself. Conclusion is “Help the Google Beast / Pet” and it will help you.
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Jason Barnard
SEO is AEO. Welcome to the show. Jason Barnard.
Alexandra Tachalova
Okay, so today I have a pleasure to interview Jason Barnard. And so, I'm very excited about that, and I'll try my best. We're going to talk today about The Google Cookbook - Making Content Easy to Digest, which is actually a very big problem because it's very popular to have all those long-form content, but it's really hard to ... Just to read them. And so, I guess that's a very hot topic nowadays.
Jason Barnard
Yep, it's a very big topic too, and I'm going to talk about it tomorrow, so I've prepared it all, finished the slide deck this morning, and I'm ready to rock with this one.
What do you mean by digest?
Jason Barnard
I like the idea that Google is having trouble, not only collecting its food, which is information, but also swallowing it, and then digesting it, so that it becomes energy for Google. Isn't that a lovely, lovely idea?
Alexandra Tachalova
Yeah, very, very, very good kind of comparison. Really.
Jason Barnard
I just made it up. I hadn't thought about that one, which is really stupid of me. Because I wrote the questions. Yeah, so it needs to identify, collect, swallow, and digest all this information to become energy, to be able to give the answers to the users. And that's a phenomenally big problem for Google.
Alexandra Tachalova
Okay, so it's just more about understanding what's going on, on particular pages and giving the right results to people. Based on this data.
Jason Barnard
Yeah.
Alexandra Tachalova
Okay. So, you talk about four main focal points. Let's go through them one by one. Starting with structure data schema, which is very popular right now- tell me how it relates to digesting by Google.
Jason Barnard
Well, the structure data, as we all know, just confirms what's already on the page, so Google would've swallowed rather the information on the page, even though it wasn't structured. But it won't be fully confident it has understood it. So, you put the schema markup, and then it becomes incredibly confident and that's what I would call digesting
Alexandra Tachalova
So, ingredients really. So, "this is cucumber and it was organic".
Jason Barnard
Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, you can give it all the information ... Break your food down into an ingredients. I don't know how far this is going to fly as an idea, but we can keep trying. But you break it down. It's name value pairs, so it really knows what you're talking about. And one thing I see is the people go, "Okay, great. I'll use it." And what they don't realize and probably what they don't do, is use it all over the place. You have somebody like Martha van Berkel who says, "Use it on every page." Bill Slawski will tell you the same thing. Aaron Bradley will tell you the same thing, and they're all right.
Alexandra Tachalova with Jason Barnard at Digital Olympus 2019
Alexandra Tachalova talks with Jason Barnard about how to not let bad promotion kill your content.
Write less, promote more… build organic traffic, get links, avoid the spike of hope. I learned how i can MUCH better promoting the #SEOisAEO podcast, which is rather cool :p) Outreach is the future (and Alex offers some advice about tools to use). Linkbuilding is and will remain fundamental, but too often overlooked. Watch out Neil Patel, Alex is coming up fast on your shoulder! In terms of content, think about ongoing content – a guide with chapters, for example. Or a podcast ! Also a bit of cheeky back scratching goes on and I beg for a link from Digital Olympus. I stop the conversation the moment Alex agrees with my analysis of the situation…
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Creator Details
Episode Count
2
Podcast Count
1
Total Airtime
35 minutes, 35 seconds
PCID
508824