Nick Smit – My Thoughts

Google recently announced schema.org, a new initiative to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. Structured markup has been around for a while, but the announcement sees Google (as well as Bing and Yahoo) making a commitment to a set of standards; and adding additional types of schema that can be used.

Schema.org Example

To take full advantage of all the attributes defined in schema.org, one would need to go through all the content on their site, marking up any information that has a corresponding schema attribute. For websites with large amounts of user submitted information, such as the South African accommodation website TravelGround.com this would require a significant amount of time to add all the markup.

So what incentive is there for the website owner to go to all the effort?

Google says that they do not “use markup for ranking purposes at this time—but rich snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, so you may see an increase in traffic.”

I think the latter part of the above point is important. Adding markup gives your page the potential to look a lot better on the search engine results page, which leads to more click-throughs to your page. A higher click-through-rate in turn seems to leads to a higher ranking in search engines.

I’ll be keeping a keen eye on schema.org developments – this is one of those features that can potentially give early movers a big advantage.

Nick

I'm a web-loving, techy entrepreneur working for a super-cool corporate, doing what I enjoy! This website is a collection of things I find interesting, as well as an update on what I'm getting up to.

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