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Google is Schemaing!
Schema.org is aggregation of html markup to help improve search results through better identification of specific information on websites. For example, it allows webmasters to specify what content on a page is about products, the images for those products, the prices for those products and more with increasing accuracy.
To start lets define what a schema is and how it benefits your site. A schema is basically a tag or microdata that you can attach to content on your site. Search engine bots will then read this microdata and know exactly what the content is, rather than guess or not recognize it for what it is. For instance, if you have a movie on your site you can then mark it with schemas to tell inform search engines specifics about the video content. With these movie schema tags you can specify the following: duration of the movie, director, actors, producers, the production company, who did the music, and much more.
With this new way of detailing information, search engines will no longer have to guess what picture you have on your site (or look at its meta information). They won’t have to guess what video you are presenting or what exactly the PDF you are downloading is about. The benefits of detailing the content on your page for search engines are worth the hard work. Your site will start ranking and you can help search engines and other applications understand your content and then display it in a useful and relevant way for the user.
Now let’s take a look at some examples of how this data is viewed and understood:
Example Music Recording Info Not Using Schema
<div>
<h1>The King of Limbs</h1>
<span>Artist: Radiohead, Founded in 1985</span>
<span>Alternative Rock</span>
<a href=”../music/bloom-sample.mp3″>Bloom Sample</a>
</div>
This is how HTML is viewed and written normally. You have just a bit of information and link to the song sample. With adding the microdata search engines can get a much better idea on the content displayed.
Using the Music Recording Schema
The first item to add would be the itemscope. This specifies what the HTML contains is about.
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/MusicRecording”>
<h1>The King of Limbs</h1>
<span>Artist: Radiohead, Founded in 1985</span>
<span>Alternative Rock</span>
<a href=”../music/bloom-sample.mp3″>Bloom Sample</a>
</div>
This specifies that the content is a musical recording, but thats not all as we can continue to add more microdata to further detail the content out. We can keep adding to this to specify each piece of content and what it means.
Finished Example Using the Music Recording Schema
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/MusicRecording”>
<h1 itemprop=”inAlbum”>The King of Limbs</h1>
<span>Artist: <span itemprop=”byArtist”>Radiohead</span>, Founded in 1985</span>
<span itemprop=”genre”>Alternative Rock</span>
<a href=”../music/king-of-limbs-sample.mp3″ itemprop=”inPlaylist”>King of Limbs Sample</a>
</div>
So you can see with this data we were able to go in and really specify each piece of content that the page has. We now show who the artist is, what album its on, and a playlist of the songs. This is great information that Google and other search engines can use to both display your content and index it for others to see and use.
You can see that adding this microdata to your HTML really enriches your content for search engines and users. There are even more schemas you can add to further define your content. The schemas range from a variety of types of content from movies to music to books to events.
Using schema on your site will only help as search engines come across and start indexing your site. Be sure to use this on all aspects of your content for the best possible results as well as making your code look clean and nice.
This is just a small sample of what schema can do for you and your content and its up to you to get out there and start tagging your content. Take a look at schema.org for a full list of schemas and any questions you may have.