'Net Features : microdata

Spice Up Holiday SEO with Product Microdata

Michael Garrity — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 21:00:00 GMT

Google can be stingy with new information about its search algorithm, which makes the company's sharing of some recent changes all the more important for Web professionals.

Likely the biggest difference in the algorithm is that Google “is now more likely to pick text from the actual page content” for snippets on SERPs, as opposed to from a header or menu text. This places much more emphasis and importance on microdata built into a site’s HTML code, which was already a key part of Bing’s SERP rankings.

For ecommerce companies trying to make a splash on search engines, especially in anticipation of the upcoming holiday shopping season, this is the perfect catalyst to get them to start thinking about including product microdata into their websites.

Deciphering Product Microdata
If you’re unfamiliar with product microdata, it is similar to regular microdata embedded in a site’s HTML, only it is specifically used to define details about – you guessed it – products.

The information encoded in product microdata includes the brand, the product category (i.e. “Books-Fiction”), the product description, the name, an image of the product, a review and/or aggregated review data, a product identifier (i.e. an ISBN or UPC number) and offer details for the product.

Micro Data, Major Impact
Implementing microdata onto your website is the best way to contextualize your content and make sense of it for the search engines. This is important for ecommerce sites that want to push their products on SERPs, because it helps the search engines better understand the content of the product(s) listed and display them in the most useful, relevant way for the searchers. This will ultimately improve the overall standing of your site on SERPs.

What makes microdata work so well is that it helps differentiate all of the content on your site. Without using microdata, your content appears to Google (or Bing, Yahoo! and others) as one big collection of words, phrases, facts, figures, etc., and all of it is indistinguishable to the machines reading it. Microdata separates this information into the most important content, organizing and classifying it to be more easily parsed by the search engines to then report back to the searchers.

As an ecommerce company, this means that each of your products can have a wholly unique description that sets them apart from both the other content on your page, and similar products that may also appear in SERPs. It’s a virtual double-whammy!

Make it Happen
Here’s the great thing about product microdata (really, microdata in general): it’s really easy to add to your site. The act of inserting microdata into your site’s HTML code is a matter of adding the necessary tags and filling in the desired information. It shouldn’t take much time at all to attach microdata to a single product on your website. Of course, the time it takes to fill out the necessary information for each product and complete the entire task is going to be relative to the number of products you offer.

Perhaps the best news of all is that the Holy Trinity of Search, Google, Yahoo! and Bing, actually combined forces to create Schema.org, a site that collects schemas (believe it or not) “that webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways recognized by major search providers.” By providing a shared markup language, these search engines make it easier for webmasters to know exactly what kind of vocabulary to add to a site’s HTML and what the search engines should look for to determine SERP placements.

Schema.org is a great resource for people looking to add structured data to their sites, as it provides all the necessary information about how to format your microdata HTML. The information about product-related microdata markup language can be found here.

A term like “microdata” can sound a little complex, which may turn off some less than Web-savvy site owners, but in reality it is a very simple idea that is easy for webmasters to integrate into a site. Especially for ecommerce companies, product microdata is crucial for making sure that searchers are getting the most accurate information about the products most relevant to them and their searches, as well as differentiating your company from your competition.

The easier it is for a search engine to crawl your site and provide the most important information about available products, the easier it will be for you to entice customers to buy those products.

New Microdata Plugin for WordPress

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:20:00 GMT

The introduction of Microdata has provided a big boost for those search marketers that have managed the implimentation. Fortunately for WordPress users, the often complicated process just became easier with the release of the MicroData for WordPress, a plugin from Internet marketing company Optimum7.

The first version of the MicroData plugin is available for download from WordPress. Users can select from six default schemas including event, person, organization, review, place and product. While in the future the plugin could provide additional support for other microdata elements (perhaps the rel-author tag) the plugin is enough to at least get those responsible for search engine optimziation started on the process.

“The implications of using MicroData for search engine optimization are clear; without it, you are not going to be as visible or as easy to crawl as the other sites that are using it. This is a must-use format, especially as it becomes more difficult to rank high in search engine results pages,” said Duran Inci, COO of Optimum7.

Structured Data

Pete Prestipino — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 12:11:00 GMT

Familiarizing one’s self with the modern markup languages, semantic structures and schemas available today can yield a more engaging, easier to manage Web property. Let’s get to know markup in this edition of Website Magazine’s Small Business Lab.

Learn more now about HTML5, Microdata and the Rel=attribute now - as seen in Website Magazine August 2011 issue: Read "Getting to Know Structured Data Markup"

Google's Author Tag – Conduits to Richer Writer Profiles

Administrator — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 17:15:00 GMT

This week Google announced support for “authorship markup” which will help the search engine connect its users with authors through the content those authors publish on the web. Google will ultimately use the data to help its users find content from specific authors directly within the search results but it could also help Google rank search results.

According to Google, the author tag markup enables websites to “publicly link within their site from content to author pages.” This means that if you were to use the markup, you would be able to connect all of the articles to an individual author page (which is what Google will likely include on search results pages). The author pages, according to the announcement, will describe and identify the author, and can include content like the author’s bio and photo, articles and other links.

Authorship markup uses the “rel” attribute in links to indicate the relationship between a content page and an author page. For example:

If you are already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, Google will interpret that authorship information as well.

An important “usage” cue was provided by Google in that the rel=author link must point to an author page on the same site as the content page. The benefit of using authorship markup and remaining consistent in usage is that search engines and other web services will be able to identify works by the same author more easily.

Google has worked with several sites to markup their pages, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and others. Google has also added the markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, both platforms will automatically include this markup when content is published.

Microdata Wins - Schema.org Brings Richer Web

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 01:00:00 GMT

Google, Bing and Yahoo jointly announced a new initiative today at Schema.org to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages in Microdata.

For many years search engines have worked independently of one another to establish some standards in structured markup. Essentially, through Schema.org, the search engines have come together to provide support for a common set of schemas – again, that would be microdata.

In the past, there were different standards for structured data markup including microdata, microformats, and RDFa, causing confusion for webmasters which may have ultimately been the cause of the slow adoption.

WM advises you to visit schema.org to learn more as there are now schemas for hundreds of new categories including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and others.

Google noted that it will continue to support markup on pages using microformats or RDFa, noting that while acceptable to use any of the previously supported structured data types, they advise against mixing formats as it can cause confusion for its parser.

Website Magazine will follow developments surrounding this announcement closely – so stay tuned for future coverage.

Google Goes International with Rich Snippets

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 14:47:00 GMT

Google announced the international availability of rich snippets on the Webmaster Central Blog this week. For those unfamiliar with rich snippets, they enable you to include additional data form your site in search results. That got your attention, didn’t it?

Documentation is now published on how to mark up sites correctly in several languages include simplied and traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Polish, and many others (including English).

Different types of rich snippets are currently supported including profiles of people, reviews, videos, events, and recipes. Google has provided a very handy testing tool which lets you validate your markup to make sure results are shown the way you want them.

Before you rush off and retool your site to include rich snippets, know that Google will be taking a “gradual approach” to surface the data – meaning there is no guarantee that the rich snippets you include will be shown on the SERP’s.