To improve your search results, search engine giants Google, Bing and Yahoo! now have agreed to a common standard for the structured markup of web content. i.e., html tags
From schema.org:
This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.
A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.
Whether you’re an internet marketer like me or a business own whom I help, you will want to keep up with this new development in structured data markup. Applying structured data markup to your website will create a richer end-user experience as well as increasing your clickthrough rates; and more conversions equals more revenue!
From The Official Google Blog:
Search engines have been working independently to support structured markup for a few years now. We introduced rich snippets to Google search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of reviews and people, and since that time we’ve expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including recipes and events. We’ve been thrilled to see content creators across the web—from stubhub.com to allrecipes.com—add markup to their pages, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than 10 times as often as when we started two years ago.
It’s great that these major search engines have come together to establish uniformity; if nothing else but for the sanity of webmasters around the world!
The question is, what does this mean for digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO)? Your thoughts?
