Tuesday 7 June 2011

Google, Bing and Yahoo join hands for new schema.org to make search easy

While surfing through the Google’s official blog last night, I came across an article about schema.org, named ‘Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web’. Bing posted the same with a different heading ‘Introducing Schema.org: Bing, Google and Yahoo Unite to Build the Web of Objects’. So, I researched thoroughly about schema.org and penned it down in my own words. Here’s my take on it:-

In the year 2006, Google, Bing and Yahoo joined hands to support common standard for sitemap. However, in 2011, they again came together to support common set of schemas called schema.org. Schema.org benefits, SEO Services Company, developers, website owners in many ways. However, the two most basic things it does are to help companies, developers, and site owners to get familiar with the structured data; and how one could improve the website’s search engine rankings for Google, Bing, Yahoo, and more.

Many of us still do not understand the motive of schema.org, which is to make the open web richer and useful. This markup is very useful for webmaster or SEO Service Provider. Google says that it takes time and effort to add this markup to website pages. It also quotes that adding markup is much harder because every search engine demands unique presentation of data. This encouraged Google, Yahoo, and Bing to come forward and support a common set of schemas.

But, that’s not all! Let me also discuss one more important issue:

How can schema.org benefit webmasters, Search Engines and an SEO Services Company? Read on to get the answer

All webmasters and SEO Companies use h1 tag to brief search engines about the page. But, it is not enough to add only h1 tag in HTML because <h1>Social Network</h1> in HTML tells browser to display “Social Network” in heading 1 format. That’s because HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text means. For example - “Social Network” could refer to a Hollywood movie or to a social networking site such as Facebook, twitter etc. This type of thing makes the task difficult for search engines to display relevant search result to the user which he or she is looking for.

So by using schema.org collection of vocabularies, webmasters can mark up their web pages in a way that could easily be understood by search engines. This also helps SEO’s to promote websites easily and more ethical way.
In addition, schema.org has introduced schemas for more than hundred new categories which include books, creative works, movies, music, events, organizations, TV series, painting, photograph, products and many more.

1 comment: