On Thursday, June 2, Google, Bing and Yahoo! announced the formation of schema.org to support and promote schemas, or HTML tags, for structured markup on the web. At Godfrey we’ve recently started using semantic tagging ourselves to take advantage of the growing support and potential that results from explicitly defining our content. . Whether you’re creating or publishing content, this new formalized support can help everyone find and share information in a consistent manner.

Most existing content on the web is in a very loosely defined format. A common structure might be something like:

<header>

<content>

<footer>

This structure is the same whether your page is about ball bearings or apple pies—and in most cases, people do not need to see it to access your content. Unfortunately, search engines and other automated programs do see it but cannot easily understand it. Even the smartest search engines still rely on algorithms to make sense of what the content is really all about.

Consider the case of our president, Chuck Manners. He’s clearly listed on our People page as our President and CEO. However, by looking at search results, it’s difficult to determine what the relationship is between Godfrey and Chuck. You and I as human readers of the pages know what it is but there’s nothing there for an engine to understand. A search engine algorithm might take all of the pages where Chuck is mentioned, positions within the company, company pages and come up with an implied relationship. 

Chuck is something, maybe a person; Godfrey is something, probably a business—and because Chuck and Godfrey are mentioned together, they must have some kind of relationship.

A page with a semantic markup structure might look something like

<header>

<person>

                <person name>

                <person title>

                <person business>

                <person details>

<footer>

Note: Yes, this is not properly formatted markup and is just presented in a format for illustrative purposes.

By actually defining what the content is, we remove all the ambiguity that existed before.  Here’s how Chuck’s page is now understood, with the semantic mark-up that defines Godfrey as an organization and Chuck as a person who is in the role of President of Godfrey.

See it in action. Check out how the Google Rich Snippets testing tool views Chuck’s page with the semantic markup.

Those highlighted parts are the rich snippets of markup that we’ve added. Google is picking up the explicit definition of Chuck as President of Godfrey in Lancaster, PA. It’s also picking up the tagged breadcrumb trail that helps relate it within the site. For all the gory details:

While Google says that rich snippets won’t affect page ranking in search results right now, we believe you should use semantic tagging wherever you can. Even marginal enhancements like you see in the image above help separate you from the crowd, and semantic markup could very well affect search results in the future.  As marketers, you want to make sure you’re getting your relevant, timely content online and make it as easy as possible for consumers to find that content. Structured, semantic data gets you closer to that goal.