In July I met Raffaele. It all started with an exchange of tweets that led to a real conversation. One thing led to another and from his feedback came important changes for WordLift .
In September, the WordLift team was invited to Semantics 2017, the largest semantic technology conference in Europe since 2005. We will present the results of a paper that demonstrates the effectiveness of semantic technologies in the field of SEO.
Where did we leave and what brought us here?
Raffaele asked me to share the experience with the WordLift team because the lessons we have learned in these eight months of startups could be useful for those who want to take, or are already going, this way.
A new web
In a famous TED Talk in February 2009, Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, asked the audience for help to build a new web. The web was born of a project born almost as a game in 1989 and was based on the concept of hypertext. What we know today as a link.
In short, the web was built on a set of links created by users , which helped to make it grow. That would have been the paradigm for the next twenty years. In 2009, however, Tim Berners-Lee felt the need to make the web evolve into a new ecosystem based on semantics.
What does it mean?
In short, imagine that for every online text there is a series of data that describe all the context characteristics of that document: author, publication date, place, and so on. In technical jargon these are called metadata (therefore, data that describe other data).
Now imagine that those metadata are used to create connections between the various online documents. When these connections take shape, they give life to a more intelligent web, based on the context and not only on the links and therefore called semantic.
It may seem obvious because we humans think in contextual terms, yet for many years the web did not work this way.
How the WordLift idea is born
The founders, Andrea Volpini and David Riccitelli , entrepreneurs since they were only sixteen years old, have started from 2011 to collaborate on two European research projects ( IKS and MICO ). These projects were born with the aim of developing open source semantic technologies.
From those academic projects Andrea and David have sensed the opportunity to develop a software for common use, which could create value for blogging .
Such as? Through the artificial intelligence that analyzes the text, the automatic addition of a language that the search engines understand (called in the technical jargon marking Schema ) and a series of widgets that serve to improve the user’s navigation. In other words, it is a tool that automates (partly – since it is always the individual to have control) the indexing and optimization of the contents of a website.
In short, it allows you to do advanced SEO without adding a line of code!
The biggest challenge began in January, when the startup was finally established after collecting investments from a European partner, WooRank, one of the major players in the field of SEO.
The two founders, Andrea and David, joined a growth team . Me as a business developer, Maria Silvia Sanna as a digital strategist, Mark Kaplun as a backend developer and Claudio Salatino as a UI / UX designer. The growth team of WordLift from the first moment has dedicated itself to one goal: growth !
