HTML markup

There’s generally little love lost between the major search engines as they compete to be everyone’s favourite Internet search solution. But in a rare moment of mutual collaboration for the greater good, Google, Bing and Yahoo! have teamed up to create schema.org – a resource aimed at supporting, “a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages,” according to Google’s official blog.

The aim of Schema is to standardise HTML markup codes so that the search engines, and by extension web users, can benefit from more easily defined content.

For example, if you create a webpage about ‘trainspotting’, it may refer to the popular nineties film directed by Danny Boyle, the book it was based on, or the less popular hobby which involves standing by railways in an anorak. A human user can decipher what the actual subject is from the context, but search engines may struggle.

Google says schema mark-ups can improve position in SERPS

HTML markup enables webmasters to tag their content in a specific category that search engines can understand, such as movies, products, events etc. The purpose of schema.org is to standardise the way this is done, and according to Google, webmasters who utilise these common ‘schemas’ will benefit from improved standings in the results pages of the major search engines.

“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,” comments Google on its blog. It goes on to say, “that’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas… 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.”

Bing meanwhile said on their blog that, “We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites. Rather than rely solely on machine learning and other AI techniques, we asked ‘what if we could enable publishers to have a single schema they could use to describe their sites that all search engines could understand?’”

This of course means extra work for webmasters and SEO professionals, but if the new schema markup codes take-off, then using them will be essential to avoid being out-ranked by pages that do include them.

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