In a recent post to their “Official Google Blog” via Linkedin, Google announced their new web initiative, schema.org which, as per their website, “…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.” That being said, what does this new process mean to the average business owner with a website?
What the Change Means to you, The Website Owner
Without getting too technical, the goal of this new integrated process from Google, Bing and Yahoo will allow for a universal application of code (markup language) that is used to build websites from the developer and designer’s standpoint. Allowing for a universal language accepted by the Big 3 Search Engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo), web developers will have an easier time once they build a site for testing across these engines for viability of the site content and SEO, search engine optimization, options.
Think of it like this: How a website is structured can drastically effect how it shows up in searches. Schema.org takes the guess work out of that process for the included search engines allowing for better page rank and find-ability for websites.
Why Schema.Org is Needed
Up until now, search engines have worked independently to update and manage markup language for websites to allow for the best results for website owners. By integrating these efforts and building universal and more intuitive code for web developers to use, web search results for users browsing on Google, Yahoo and Bing are bound to be significantly different (read: improved) than before.
Like Google said in their blog post, “We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.”