I recently received a question from a reader asking about the way search engines were using microformats and other forms of structured markup.
Today, I am going to address that topic from the perspective of its impact on SEO. What is particularly interesting about this topic is that structured markup provides publishers a way to provide the search engines information about their website(s).
One of the original ways of doing that was with meta tags. Unfortunately, these were so badly abused by spammers that Google stopped using it as a ranking signal. Google finally stated this publicly in this post in 2009, which notes that “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”
Google continues to indicate that markup is not used as a ranking signal: “Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time.” However, there are important SEO benefits to using markup, and I will explore these in today’s column.
Markup In Search Results
The first benefit is that you can impact the appearance of your search listings, creating what we call a “rich snippet.” Here is an example of rich snippets in the search results, as shown on a search for one of my favorite recipes, loc lac:
The presence of the stars in the search listing will tend to draw the human eye and increase the click-through rate for those results. These modified listings are a result of the use of markup in the source code for the web pages.
The next two screenshots will give you a view as to what the code is for the first of the two search results. The first screenshot shows a piece of the recipe format (which is a type of Microformat) that includes the code for specifying the breadcrumb links:
Looking farther down in the recipe format, we get a look at the code which shows an implementation of a review (in the review-aggregate tag) and also shows the cook time for the recipe:
You will see additional elements included in the markup as well. My purpose in showing you this is not to try to teach you the coding details, but to illustrate the connection between the use of publisher tagged data and an impact on the search results.
There are much more examples of rich snippets and a discussion of different types of markup here. You can see information on microdata, microformats, and RDFa, as well as the types of categories supported by Google. Some of the more common types of markup are:
In June, Google announced support for the “rel=author”, which is another form of markup. This adds the author’s picture in the search results next to search listings for the articles they have written.
No comments:
Post a Comment