Content Strategy Interviews

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