I've always believed in the whole two sides to every story, two sides of the same coin type of thing. There's much to be learned by observing both sides of an issue. Sometimes, that's the only way to determine a solution that can not only appease, but benefit both parties.
Today's story... today's coin: a webpage.
What are the two sides of a webpage?
- The developers' side- often the search engines' side as well. To developers, and specifically to search engines, webpages are encoded content. At a glance, the code can be overwhelming, if not indecipherable to typical humans. Nevertheless, those codes are what compose on-page content... which leads us to the other side of the coin.
- The browsers' side. To browsers, webpages are interpretable content - images, text, instructions, information, opinions, feedback and more. Thanks to common sense and on-page context clues, browsers can place appropriate emphasis on certain elements of text to help understand what a page is all about.
Example #1: a famished browser stumbles upon a webpage dedicated to a recipe for crème brûlée.
The browser understands that the words "heavy cream," "egg yolks," "sugar," "salt," "vanilla," and "brown sugar" are ingredients in that recipe.
A search engine crawler perceives these words as ordinary text. It lumps them in with all of the other ordinary words on every other ordinary webpage out there. The road to mutual understanding in Crème Brûléeville ends here.
But if "heavy cream," "egg yolks," "sugar," "salt," "vanilla," and "brown sugar" were formatted with proper HTML codes, both browser and crawler would interpret the structured data in the same way:
- The browser would recognize that the items are ingredients in a recipe based on context and common sense.
- The crawler would recognize that the tags attributed to each content item make them ingredients in a recipe.
By incorporating microformat or RDFa HTML tags that don't alter the appearance of your website, you're targeting your two main audiences: browsers and crawlers. You're getting the best of both worlds, which converge seamlessly on the Semantic Web.
The Semantic Web - ah, a marvelous realm where all published content is universally defined by a universal structure; where robots and humans can understand the same language; where webmasters can optimize their pages in a revolutionized way.
Arguably the household name in online search, Google, is pushing forward with structured data for the following content items (to learn more about their specific structure, click each item):
For now, Reviews and People seem to be the only two active objects, and the feature is currently only compatible with English text. Even so, this is an epic step forward for developers, crawlers, and browsers alike.
Don't believe me? Alright...
Example #2: John Doe has a website promoting his restaurant. He wants one page to feature the body text of a recent culinary review of his exquisite establishment. He decides to take the optimal route and employ structured data.
Rather than typing the review into a WYSIWYG, John plugs it into the structured data microformat for Reviews provided by Google. The properties and their corresponding descriptions give a tremendous new weight and clarity to this content:
John doesn't have any experience with microformats, but he doesn't need to.The structured data code requires little more than basic XHTML knowledge:
Now, instead of perceiving John's content as a regular mass of body text, search engine spiders can literally crawl it as a review-- aware of what is being reviewed, who reviewed it, when it was reviewed, and how high it was rated.
Those simple properties and tags are a heck of a lot more insightful than unstructured data as crawlers index and rank SERPs. In turn, the snippets then generated by Google are a heck of a lot more insightful to browsers as they choose whether or not to click through to John's restaurant's webpage.
The team at Hudson Horizons believes this is a monumental step forward in the evolution of the Internet. We're so excited to announce that along with Google, we'll be accommodating structured data in microformat so that every single piece of content we contribute to a webpage is allotted the emphasis and significance it deserves - for crawlers and browsers alike.
To learn more about Google's developments with structured data, visit the Google Webmaster / Site Owner Help Center -
Marking Up Structured Data, and contact Hudson Horizons today to learn more about the ways we're
embracing Microformat to help enhance and optimize your webpages.
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