Search engines have come a
long way in past 20 years. You might have noticed that search is starting to
change a little bit. If you do a search on Google for “Apple Pie” you will see a lot of results there. Most of
which look like recipes. Its pretty clear that you could click on any of these
and I'd go to a page that would produce a recipe.
You will start to notice that
there are highlighted results. The highlighted results might have a rating. You
will see the star rating that's there? They have a certain number of reviews. They
have an amount of time that it will take to make the recipe and even the
calorie count. Why do those results look different relative to all other result
on the page? Well, its because the site owners (web designer/developer) marked up their contents (semantic web) in a very well
defined way that's known to Google. Google knew that these are recipes with
ratings and time and calorie counts. So it included all of that information in
the search results.
If you did another Google
search for the band “Shinedown” you would get results for Shinedown. With this
search you'll notice that the serach has come back with some music tracks underneath
the band’s name. We have information about the band Shinedown and we also have
some tracks that play snippets of their music.
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| The value of the semantic web |
Based on the type of
information that's being displayed we can make sure that the displayed
content is marked up in such a way that Google can read and display it
accordingly. This is done through semantic markup in HTML5. When we talk about
semantic markup we talk about markup that has meaning rather than markup
defining the presentation or the look of the website. Semantics then takes on
two complimentary approaches. One is to look at the mark up used in plain old
HTML5.
In HTML-5 we can look at the tags
that have meaning behind them like, headers, footers, articles, asides and
more. You can also look at links and their relationships which are also very
important for semantics.
The second approach is the standardized way of
presenting a certain type of content online. Events, recipes, people, places,
these are all common information on the web. Through the use of micro data or
RDFa lite you can add some additional HTML5 attributes to your markup to
standardize the way this information is presented.
By doing so you help the search
engines understand your content in a new way that will help in your effects to
get your content indexed. The more you help the search engines understand your
content the better your page rankings.
Steve Steinberger
561-281-8330
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