
SEO Roadmap laid out?
Believe it or not, Google, Bing, and Yahoo want your business or website to have good Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Better SEO for you means that their users are finding the best and most relevant information for their searches, so everybody is happy. Although the three largest search engine companies are in major competition with one another, they’ve laid down their swords and worked together to build a standarized markup vocabulary (a standard coding system such as HTML and SGML that is used to structure, index, and link text files), outlined at Schema.org, that will revolutionize SEO as we know it.
How will SEO Change?
‘What if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?” Bing’s Steve Macbeth wrote in a Microsoft blog post.
This is a great question, because today many company’s websites are made from data stored in databases and once the information is translated into HTML, some of the original data is difficult to recover. This means that when the search engines are trawling the web for relevant webpages during a search you might not show up, this means your SEO is in the red or your SEO is completely ineffective.
Schema.org wants direct access to this data to provide you with better SEO and in turn provide better search results for their users.
“We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites,” Bing’s Steve MacBeth stated. Thanks Steve, because we want better SEO too!
What They’ve Developed for SEO
The super group have built a collection of HTML tags to accurately index content in your webpage producing better SEO for you. These schemas, or markup tags, will allow you, the marketer to explain what it is you are marketing with your site and find your true consumer base.
Now you are probably wondering what common schemas are and how to correctly use them to benefit your SEO. We recommend that you check out Shema.org for a list of 100 schemas for great SEO and check out some top tips from a great business2community article listed below. Your SEO will be rocking the charts in no time.
1.Learning the ropes. There are now more than 100 Schemas and the website does a good job in breaking down each into sections be most relevant to you. If in the past, you’ve tried to add rich snippets markup before was almost potluck. There weren’t a lot of options.
Here are a few popular types:
Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
Event
Organization
Person
Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
Review, AggregateRating
2. Learning the language. The Schema vocabulary is extensive but it’s also applicable to every web page on the Internet. If you are planning on developing a comprehensive SEO plan, you’ll have to know how to navigate the vocabulary pages. It may seem obvious but the best place to begin is the Getting Started document. Here you will learn how information within your web page can be structured through “types” and “properties” and ultimately reach a wider, more targeted audience and produce better SEO.
3. Plan your plan. A simple audit of your website can easily help you determine which Schema types fit based on each individual Web page. The most complicated part of your plan will be organizing the data. The amount of data you collect depends on the amount of detail on its page and how tailored you want your results to be for each specific audience to increase SEO.
4. Testing, testing 1, 2, 3. It’s very useful to test your Web pages with markup to make sure search engines are able to parse the data correctly, if not your SEO will be below average. As with previous rich snippets markup formats, you should use the rich snippets testing tool for this purpose. Note that while the testing tool will show the marked up information that was parsed from the page, rich snippets previews are not yet shown for schema.org markup. We’ll be adding this functionality soon.
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