intelligence
intelligence ~ the ability to comprehend; to understand and profit from experience
market assessment
Assessing the online marketplace before defining a strategy is an essential element of campaign planning. Situational Analysis helps to develop an understanding of your online audience and how their needs are currently being addressed by your and your competitors' web marketing. The objective of Competitive Intelligence is not to steal trade secrets or other proprietary property, but rather to gather a wide range of information that when collated and analysed transforms it into relevant, accurate and usable strategic knowledge about your competitors' tactics, position, performance and intentions.
semantic analysis
Traditional Information Retrieval (IR) technology is based almost purely on the occurrence of words in documents. Search engines have generally augmented this in the context of the Web with information about the hyperlink structure of the Web, e.g. Google's PageRank (PR).
Semantic search is the new search paradigm that overcomes the limitations of standard keyword search that cannot express concepts or the relationship of concepts. Deployment of LSA by search engines means that context and relevance are the new quality indicators for indexing.
However, semantic-based search lacks a real ontology and uses implicit concepts rather than explicit knowledge. Understanding the artificial semantics used by the search engines and not the Semantic Web itself is critical. In-depth theme analysis of your industry's topical community and top performing sites is the only way to reveal the true Optimisation route-map.
link reputation
Link Reputation goes hand-in-hand with semantic-based search. It involves the relevance that backlinks (links pointing back to you) have to a target web page and the context of those backlinks. This relationship can be measured with respect to a particular theme and has the consequence of revealing how strong (in terms of search engine ranking) a backlink speaks about your page.