Search engine giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing have joined forces to launch a new online resource in an effort to help site owners and developers improve their SEO.
The new site, Shcema.org, aims to be a one-stop resource for webmasters looking to add mark-up to their pages.
“We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this mark-up to their pages, and adding mark-up is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way,” Google Fellow Ramanathan Guha said in a blog post.
“That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006.”
“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 as well in the future.”
Bing partner Steve Macbeth said in an online post: “We want to enable publishers to give us hints about what things they are describing on their sites.”
“We at Bing see this as a major step forward for the web, simplification for webmasters and richer, more informative search results for consumers.”
On the site, webmasters will find descriptions of various SEO techniques, including tutorials on how to include certain HTML pages on their websites so Google, Bing and Yahoo will be able to determine what the content of that site contains.
Reseo chief executive Chris Thomas says Google is catering to a specific type of webmaster here, specifically those that are using HTML to create interactive websites that aren’t heavy on text and don’t provide a lot of content for search engines to index.
“Many aren’t using Flash because Apple doesn’t support it, so they’re creating these new types of sites which are friendly, but the issue is from a search engine optimisation point they are right at the cutting edge of what a search engine wants in terms of content that is tightly themed,” Thomas says.
Thomas says webmasters can now use this type of language to improve the search engine rankings of their interactive pages.
“So these types of mark-ups enable you to get the best of both worlds. At the same time as they allow a rich interactive experience, they are also fully searchable on the search engine index,” he says.
