SEO Relevancy: Assessing the Value of Schema

ginidietrichetelligence You were right GD, SEO just has to be part of the everyday vernacular of modern PR pros. If you don't know it, how can you work with clients who expect that you are up to speed on the most recent trends that will maximize their exposure and traffic? It a'int just about writing press releases anymore.

Lisa Gerberetelligence I'm with Lisa in that a lot of this goes over my head. For the most part, I've found that if you create good relevant content, it does most of the SEO work for you, without dealing with all the tools that are out there. Again, I'm not in ecommerce, but for my clients, and for myself, that's how I see the most success.

I'm just curious how important the "markup" is. I ask because it's somewhat foreign to me, and I've found that most of the SEO folks who get a hold of websites do a good job of messing them up. But that's my experience and know it isn't universal.

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KenMuellerLisa Gerber As Gini pointed out in her post on 12/20, PR Pros would be well served to educate themselves on current SEO trends which are coming at us fast and furious and are having a larger impact on how Web sites are viewed by major search engines. I understand that language in the post may be foreign to some and I was truly trying to stray away from that but its hard to describe schema.org vocabulary without getting into some SEO geek speak.

Ken, I think you have a good question on how important markup is, the quality of an SEO pro goes beyond their ability to understand correct markup protocol. Just like any other profession there are those who excel and those that don't but I can assure you that as billions of pages containing different content are uploaded to the Web, understanding and using tools like schema will be all that more important because search engines are struggling to find ways that they can come together and create common vocabularies that help them to parse and sort this information into something meaninful and relevant to you and to me. There are many ways to continue to use keyword optimization, backlinks, fresh content, etc. to catch the attention of search engines and all of these work well, but common vocabularies (like schema) are becoming a new tool for the search giants to have in their belts that helps all of us have a more positive search experience.

KenMuellerLisa Gerber I believe it's easier when you are seeing it first hand guys! Much easier in fact. Articles almost always make it seem like rocket science when it's really just data entry, you just need to know where your spreadsheet is.

Ken, Markup is pretty important. It used to be the most important thing in SEO, and it will be again one day. Wordpress and most blog management scripts do 80% of the markup for you.

The problem with Google's algorithm as technology sees it is that it counts on humans to rank each piece of content through backlinks. Humans are subjective (Spin Sucks is one of my favorite sites, so I'm more likely to backlink to it than another site!), and the end game would be to develop an algorithm that took humans totally out of the equation, but provided higher quality results that couldn't be taken advantage of.

Machines cannot read http documents very well, they mostly rely on meta data. There are however languages that are more readily readable by machines, these include XML (extensible markup language) which is the format Google accepts sitemaps in, OWL (Web Ontology Language) which is used extensively in the medical research field where datasets are extremely large, and RDF (Resource Description Framework) which forms the basis of metadata for web resources, and if most likely the origin of the new Schema.

Schema is targeting the WWW as a whole, don't expect to see backlinks disappear anytime soon from SEO, but it would be feasible to use semantic search for a smaller dataset right now. The standards laid out today will form the basis of what is to come though.

etelligence Well said Adam.

etelligence Thank you Adam and thanks for your input on the research. I agree that we are still a long way from the semantic web although slowly but surely we are getting there. Someone recently gave me an interesting exercise to test out. Type in the words "white vans" into a search engine and see what results are returned. Depending on your search history, demograhic and a host of other variables search results for someone who may be younger and closer to the city might yield Vans the shoes as their first few pages of search results whereas someone else a little older out in the burbs who's search history in the past has included cars might get the white van automobile instead. A good example of how search engine results are more refined but still might not be 100% relevant quite yet.

John_Trader1 That is interesting John. I get shoes lol, I even tried logging out of my gmail account. I live in an extremely rural area, but I'm 26, and my search history is probably heavy on tech.

I would love to hear from someone who gets Ice Cream trucks and delivery vans!

etelligence Interesting, when I typed it in as I was testing I also got Vans shoes which is probably appropriate for me since I have shopped for shoes recently online and purchased a surfer type piece of clothing recently. Thanks for the feedback.