SEO Schema

The New Common Search Engine Vocabulary That Could Bring You More Visitors
Search engines have long been developing ways to enrich the search engine results that they display to us search engine users so that we can make more informed decisions about which link we want to click on. Newer ways of creating websites and new types of content have however been making it difficult for search engines to actually understand what they find in the code and source of our web pages, thus making it more difficult to create more detailed search engine results.

One particular challenge to all search engines for example are web pages which are generated from databases. When this ‘structured data’ is formatted into the code language that our web pages are written in e.g. html, its original ‘structure’ is changed and is therefore more difficult for search engines to understand.

The Challenge
How can the major search engines ensure that they can present better looking search engine results for the wide variety of web page types?

The Answer
Google Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo have collaborated to produce some 100 new code annotations or ‘markup’ that can be added to your current web page code. Dubbed ‘schemas’, the meaning of these new annotations can all be understood by the day to day automatic search engines systems of Google Bing and Yahoo, and their addition to your pages should allow a better / more detailed entry in the search engine results.

The Origins
Google for example has long been focusing continuously improving the quality and integrity of its search engine results either by altering the ‘algorithms’ (decision trees) which are at the heart of its automatic system for ranking web pages, or by trying to better control and present the list of links that it returns as a response to any search engine query. For example, part of Google’s search engine technology is the ability to present ‘snippets’ of information next to your listing in the search engine results which are constructed from the relevant text parts of your pages e.g. when you have not included a Meta Description on the head of your web page.

Ones big step further on from this was Google’s move in 2009 to start showing ‘rich snippets’ of information from your website in the search engine results. Suddenly a page of search engine results could contain photos next to a link, information about reviews, price information, and generally more information from the website that is likely to be useful to us in order to decide whether the link is one we want to click on. It is just this kind of displaying ‘rich’ information that the new ‘schema’ markups are designed to facilitate.

Collaboration
The introduction of XML site maps provided another important step along the road to this latest development because it saw the major search engines collaborating to make sure that they could all understand XML site maps i.e. a common protocol was developed. It is in the spirit of this kind of mutually beneficial collaboration that the new ‘schema’ have been developed.

What Is ‘Schema’?
Schema is the collective name for this new selection of “shared vocabularies”. The idea is that the existing code language that your page is built in can be added to with the appropriate ‘markup’ vocabulary ‘schema’ i.e. these new tags of code can be added to the html code of your existing pages so that search engines will understand more about e.g. a movie, place, person, video etc that is featured in your page. One thing to bear in mind if you’re thinking about using these new ‘schema’ is that it should only really be applied to the content of web pages that is actually visible to human visitors, and that you’ll need to choose the right schema types and properties that best fit your pages.

How To Find Out About ‘Schema’
The website www.schema.org shows and gives information about the collection of schemas available. The ‘Documentation’ section of the website provide a basic ‘Getting Started’ guide, and ‘Frequently asked questions’.