I have pages on my site of some famous personalities, I want to embed short description of them from wikipedia (similar to what google shows on the side when you search for subject that exists on wikipedia), and have the possibility to style the text too, is there a ways to do that dynamically?
You can actually use the Freebase API (in particular, the Topic API) to do something like this. Basically, you want to fetch the /common/topic/description attribute, like this:
https://www.googleapis.com/freebase/v1/topic/m/02mjmr?filter=/common/topic/description
(You can also use Freebase to get most of the other attributes that display in the Knowledge Graph).
Related
I read the article The Complete Guide to Creating On-Site Reviews + Testimonials Pages. I would like to create my own solution on our website to collect reviews on our website that Google can find. I'm not 100% sure if I understand this correctly.
So I would create a form with appropriate inputs and take that user input and create a JSON-LD object in a <script> tag and place that in the head of our /reviews/ page. So each review listed on our /reviews/ page would be in an array of JSON-LD objects, and that's how Google can find it?
Is it as simple as that? Placing the JSON-LD in the <head> with the correct data?
This site was used as an example on the article I linked. They use a third-party service that is basically doing what I am going to set out to do. I don't see the data in the head when viewing source, but I guess it's a good practice to hide the JSON-LD somewhere? I see a JSON-LD script, but it's empty.
Can someone help me understand this better?
The idea is to provide machine-readable structured data about the reviews, using the vocabulary Schema.org. Three syntaxes are supported: JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa.
See a comparison. With Microdata and RDFa, you would add HTML attributes to the existing markup for the reviews. With JSON-LD, you would add the structured data in a separate script element and leave the review markup untouched.
This script element can be in the head or in the body. By default, it’s visually hidden no matter where it’s placed.
If you provide such structured data, consumers (like Google Search) may make use of it. For example, Google Search offers the Review rich result feature. Their documentation describes which Schema.org types/properties are needed to qualify for it.
The Google search result usually contains a title and a piece of content from the indexed html. I can understand how title is extracted but does anyone know how Google determine which part of content to be shown?
Google uses several different algorithms to decide what to display in the search result snippet, so there's no way to define what will show 100% of the time. Google does appear to rely heavily on the "description" meta field, so what you put there is often a good indication of what will appear in the snippet, but once again, it's not a sure thing.
So recently am reading a book called Adaptive Webdesign and I came across something called an hcard, hcalendar and I went to it's respective documentation page. Now the question is am not understanding how this works? It is used to represent people..and the markup goes like this
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://tantek.com/">Tantek Çelik</a>
</div>
Now I know these classes have meanings like url indicates that a given link takes the user to a webpage and fn signifies formatted name so on...
So does these classes point the search engines that the content is a hCard or it render's differently etc..Can someone explain me how this works, whats the benefits to do so, and does this have importance from SEO point of view and are these classes predefined?
Edit: So are these classes reserved? What if I use them for other elements? And is there any javvascript which I can call onclick of a button to save a vcard on computer/user device?
This concept allows machines the get detailed informations about content. It's quite simple, you know what a given name is. Machines does not... :)
So you need a way to tell a machine what kind of data your html contains.
For example: You could enrich your data like the example below and allow, maybe an Adressbook-Application, to get detailed informations about which fields should be filled.
<div class="vcard">
<a class="url fn" href="http://tantek.com/">
<span class="family-name">Tantek</span>
<span class="given-name">Çelik</span>
</a>
</div>
This snippet allows the Adressbook-App. to find the given name easily and set it to the correct field. Order doesn't matter here.
Test your "Rich Snippets": http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
If you haven't declared that you're using the hCard syntax (by using the vcard class), then you're free to use whatever class names you'd like. Even if you did start using the hCard microformat, no styles will be applied implicitly, as microformats are not related to display style.
The purpose of using microformats is to open an interface for exposing metadata. By providing the data in a standardized microformat, anyone parsing your website can use the microformat to find relevant information.
Search engines in particular benefit from this as it allows them to provide more information about a particular resource on their results page.
vCard is a standard for an electronic business card. hCard takes these labels and uses them as class names around data in HTML.Every hCard starts inside a block that has class="vcard".
Some of these types have subproperties. For example, the 'tel' value contains 'type' and 'value'. This way you can specify separate home and business phone numbers. The 'adr' type has a lot of subproperties (post-office-box, extended-address, street-address, locality, region, postal-code, country-name, type, value).
<div class="vcard">
<div class="fn">xxxxx</div>
<div class="adr">
<span class="locality">yyyy</span>,
<span class="country-name">zzzzz</span>
</div>
</div>
The class names don't have to mean anything within your page. However, you can always take advantage of them to style your contact information. You could also style them in your browser's User Style Sheet, so that you can find them while you surf the web. (Original source)
Regarding the SEO aspects, Please checkout this article Tips for Local Search Engine Optimization for Your Site
I don't know exactly of hcard and hcalendar, but for instance, look up a Stack Overflow question on Google, you'll see that the time when it was posted appears next to the content, for many sites it also displays the name of the author.
In other words, Google will use these microformats to enhance the search experience, by providing meta-data for the search as it was parsed from the page.
You help Google, they help you.
I'd recommend you to use http://schema.org/ for microformats. Google officially recommends using it, and it is also fully supported by Bing and many other search engines. When you use schema.org microformats, search engine crawlers will extract data entities from your markup and will display them in search results in corresponding manner.
So yes, there are benefits of using microformats. By using them you can improve behavior of search engine crawlers, your content will be properly indexed and what is more important, it will be properly categorized, so it will appear in customized searches.
I have added meta tag description in my page, but it is not displaying when I search my page in google.
It is displaying something else from my blog page. Please let me know if any one is aware of this.
Thanks in advance!!
Anand
The meta description is only a hint - it's not guaranteed to be used. If you search for your site like this: site:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com instead, then you'll see the meta description, verifying you've entered it correctly.
The snippet that is shown on the search engine result page depends on the keywords the person searches for, so you can't really target any specific text there.
You should also be aware that Google doesn't actually use the description as part of it's ranking algorithm - words that are in the description don't count as part of the page. (i.e. if your description was wueoqwiueoiuoiauiouwqoeuq, your page wouldn't rank for that term if the only place it was was in the description.)
Google does not always show the meta description. If it finds something better on your site to use, it uses that snippet instead.
Look at this article to learn more.
Google may or may not use meta tag descriptions. Mostly it doesn’t, because experience shows that they are widely used by site authors for excessive and often misleading advertising instead of informative content. But in special cases, especially when there are no useful matches for the search words in content, it may use meta tag descriptions, as you can see by googling with
url:watchcricket-online.blogspot.com
I am making a web page that displays fragments of text from news sites (CNN, BBC, etc.) but I also want it to be read to people who can't see. How can I program the HTML page to read the text for them? Any ideas?
Thanks, Boda Cydo.
People who can't see will already be using either a screen reader (which will read the text to them), braille display or similar.
You just need to focus on making the text accessible and let their software handle "displaying" it to them.
The best way to make your website readable to people who cannot see is to use semantic HTML and follow standards. HTML readers can't magically infer your meaning if you don't. For example:
Use H1-H6 to designate the correct levels of titles in your site
Use P tags for body content
Use UL lists for navigation and A tags only for things that are really links
Use CSS for style - If an image is just used for style, put it in a background image instead
Only use tables for data that really is tabular.
If you have any content images, use IMG and provide ALT text
Use LABEL tags appropriately for forms
Use title attributes where appropriate
Most importantly - try turning off CSS in your browser. Does your web page still make sense to you? If so, you are probably on the right path.
No, you need to use Flash or a Java Applet to do this. There is nothing native in a browser for text-to-speech. Most people with these needs already have software that does this for them.
look to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAWS_%28screen_reader%29 . As far as i know it have integration with browsers
As Diodeus noted, if they have a need for text to speech then they will already have software to read for them. Just make the text available.
If you actually want to go through with implementing it yourself (though I wouldn't recommend it) then you can try to use the Google Translate API as described here. It looks like Google has taken down that text-to-speech site for now, but I assume (since it's Google after all) that they'll eventually release it. You may want to also look at the Android TTS library here.