Today, the major search engines announced that were unilaterally supporting a new schema for organizing information.
Technical goop aside (and it is perilously technical), it’s a pretty interesting leap for the SEO community. Here’s why.
SEO is about relevance. If your site, for example, is more relevant than a competitors, then you should have a higher result in search engines.
Easy enough. Except:
- Search engines have a difficult time extracting meaning from content
- All search engines are different
So what does the new microdata element change? The short answer is that you can increase the perceived relevance of your document by defining the elements of a web page with specific microdata (or “types” and “scope” as schema indicates).
The hard truth is that implementing the schema is a lot of work. There are 100 current ‘types’, so updating markup won’t be an easy task. But search engines promise that the richer SERPs are worth the effort – so if you’re serious about search, it’s likely worth the effort.
Author: Sean Enns, posted on June 2, 2011 at 2:11 pm, filed under Search Engine Optimization. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.