So I've been looking into this HTML 5 Microdata, but I'm not sure if or when it is appropriate to use. I know that if used with rating and you search a website it will pull up things like video rating and article ratings etc. But for Microdata like People or Places, is that so useful that I should start implementing it into all my websites - big and small? How big of an impact will this really have on my SEO if I start using Microdata on everything?
Maybe using something like http://schema.org/ as my standard term dictionary. I think that is what Google suggests using. Here's a link to the dev of microdata http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/ which will be helpful if you are unfamiliar with microdata
Following to that Schema.org - Why You're Behind if You're Not Using It... article on SEOMoz, I must say this question is not just about microdata and Google SERPs positions. I think it has to be taken in a much wider meaning:
Some advantages:
Implementing microdata on a website DOES increase CHANCE for Rich
Snippets displayed next to your site on Google search results. You can't say 'microdata = rich snippets', but you also can't say 'no microdata = no rich snippets' :)
Having rich snippets increases users' attention to that single search result and it CAN result in more clicks => visitors on your page.
Some cons:
Some rich snippets, which can be a result of using microdata, can let users find information they're looking for directly on the search results, without actually reaching your page. eg. if user is looking for a phone number and see it on rich snippet, he doesn't have to click and visit your page.
You have to decide on your own if you can take that risk. From my own experience (and that article comments as well), that risk is quite small and if you can, you should implement microdata. Of course, 'if you can' should really mean: 'if you can and it won't need the whole site to be rebuilt' :) If you have more serious things to do on your site, you should put them in front of a queue. Today, it's only 'nice-to-have', not 'must-have'.
And just for the end - I know my answer is not just yes or not the answer, but it's because the question is not that kind of question. However, I hope it could help you make your own decision.
My answer would be "Always."
It's the emerging standard for categorizing all forms of information on the web.
Raven Tools (no affiliation) has a schema.org microdata generator that's a good place to start:
http://schema-creator.org/product.php
They have a couple stock schema templates on that page (look on the left column).
Related
As my title explains, how do I adapt a website for blind people? From what I've heard, there's a new Swedish law at the end of this year that says that websites should be adapted for blind people. It doesn't concern all websites, but website that contain information about the authorities such as police, hospitals, banks, pension/retirement benefit and so on.
This is the absolute first time I've heard of this. I have no idea how to adapt the homepage for blind people for the company I work for. Any ideas?
Where do I begin and how do I apply sounds that reads the content of the site? Is there any tutorial on this matter?
This is quite a broad topic but can be covered relatively easily.
What you're talking about is making use of Web Accessibility. The best way to be able to achieve eb accessibility is to make sure that your mark-up is valid and everything keeps to a certain structure that a screen reader or robot would be able to read it with ease and relay that back to a blind person.
The W3C have a full initiative towards Web Accessibility (the WAI) who are there to sort out how to verify a page is accessible for those incapable of accessing the web in the normal way (Mouse, keyboard and monitor).
They have a set of easy checks which are easy to follow and make amendments from your website to.
Read them here: http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/preliminary
Ultimately, your best way to achieve full web accessibility is to ensure that the HTML mark-up is clean and has every last piece of meta data required, all images have alt tags and the structure to your page is easy for robots to understand and follow. HTML5 helps with this massively as you now have the usage of tags such as <article> and <aside> which are there to determine article areas and article details areas (great for blogs and news stories).
Hope this helps and if you need more information, then the W3C and WAI are your best bets.
W3C: http://www.w3.org/
Wai: http://www.w3.org/WAI/
There are a number of different standards people use when designing for accessibility. You generally need to include things like alt tags for images and links on your page, ensure your page can be viewed without JavaScript, high contrast modes, etc.
Try looking at WAI for some standards and how to get started. If accessibility is being enforced by your countries legislature, they will generally choose a standard or create one that you should adhere to.
Generally people viewing websites that need to hear the content will use a screen reader. It will go through the content and read it to the user. There are a number of readers that you can use for free and try out.
I have just read a lot of different information about Data-Vocabulary.org and Schema.org about how it's good for SEO. But I'm really not sure that anyone uses it in a real site. Am I right?
If not can someone provide some links to real site with this stuff?
And second question does it make sense to use it in HTML5?
Search on Google for any restaurant, or destination covered by TripAdvisor or Yelp (in other words, any restaurant or destination) and you'll see the magic of microformats at work -- see the rating stars and other meta-information?
And yes: use them. And yes, follow schema.org guidelines. And no, it doesn't matter at all which version of HTML you use them in, so write in HTML 5 and do other good things.
Whether they help for SEO is a somewhat different question. Microformats are unlikely to have a significant influence on your site's rankings as long as you use them as suggested.
However, take a look at the pages that have them and are able to influence what a search engine displays when it lists your site. While some have argued that "there's no need to click through if all the information is summarized" this has not proven to be true in practice. (See this article http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-rich-snippets-structured-markup-for-high-powered-seo-99081). In short, having microformats that distinguish your site from others is good for everyone.
What is the benefit of using XFN (XHTML Friends Network)? I've seen this on multiple blogs and social networking sites but I don't really understand why it's useful. Other than being able to style these elements with CSS3 and select them with JavaScript, what's the benefit? Do you know of any sites out there that really utilize XFN to enhance the user experience? Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Do you know of any sites out there
that really utilize XFN to enhance the
user experience?
Microformats aren't meaned to show extra information on the website itself, if it was, it could be used like John. You should think in another direction, for example, maybe browsers will support microformats one day.
Search engines may find this XFN-information interesting for one or another reason to see how the world is connected; I'm not sure what they actually could do with this information. You can read about that on Wikipedia
By the way, you can find out who your friends on the web are using Google's Social Graph API
Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Take a look at microformat.org's wiki
I'm looking for ways to prevent indexing of parts of a page. Specifically, comments on a page, since they weigh up entries a lot based on what users have written. This makes a Google search on the page return lots of irrelevant pages.
Here are the options I'm considering so far:
1) Load comments using JavaScript to prevent search engines from seeing them.
2) Use user agent sniffing to simply not output comments for crawlers.
3) Use search engine-specific markup to hide parts of the page. This solution seems quirky at best, though. Allegedly, this can be done to prevent Yahoo! indexing specific content:
<div class="robots-nocontent">
This content will not be indexed!
</div>
Which is a very ugly way to do it. I read about a Google solution that looks better, but I believe it only works with Google Search Appliance (can someone confirm this?):
<!--googleoff: all-->
This content will not be indexed!
<!--googleon: all-->
Does anyone have other methods to recommend? Which of the three above would be the best way to go? Personally, I'm leaning towards #2 since while it might not work for all search engines, it's easy to target the biggest ones. And it has no side-effect on users, unless they're deliberately trying to impersonate a web crawler.
I would go with your JavaScript option. It has two advantages:
1) bots don't see it
2) it would speed up your page load time (load the comments asynchronously and unobtrusively, e.g. via jQuery) ... page load times have a much underrated positive effect on your search rankings
Javascript is an option but engines are getting better at reading javascript, to be honest I think your thinking too much into it, Engines love unique content, the more content you have on each page the better and if the users are providing it... its the holy grail.
Just because your commenter made a reference to star wars on your toaster review doesn't mean your not going to rank for the toaster model, it just means you might rank for star wars toaster.
Another idea would be, you could only show comments to people who are logged in, collegehumor do the same I believe, they show the amount of comments a post has but you have to login to see them.
googleoff and googleon are for the Google Search Appliance, which is a search engine they sell to companies that need to search through their own internal documents. It's not effective for the live Google site.
I think number 1 is the best solution, actually. The search engines doesn't like when you give them other material than you give your users so number 2 could get you kicked out from the search listings altogether.
This is the first I have heard that search engines provide a method for informing them that part of a page is irrelevant.
Google has a feature for web masters to declare parts of their site for a web search engine to use to find pages when crawling.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php
You might be able to relatively de-emphasize some things on the page by specifying the most relevant keywords using META tag(s) in the HEAD section of your HTML pages. I think that is more in line with the engineering philosophy used to architect search engines in the first place.
Look at Google's Search Engine Optimization tips. They spell out clearly what they will and will not let you do to influence how they index your site.
The Semantic Web is an awesome idea. And there are a lot of really cool things that have been done using the semantic web concept. But after all this time I am beginning to wonder if it is all just a pipe dream in the end. If we will ever truly succeed in making a fully semantic web, and if we are not going to be able to utilize semantic web to provide our users a deeper experience on the web is it worth spending the time and extra effort to ensure FULLY semantic web pages are created by myself or my team?
I know that semantic pages usually just turn out better (more from attention to detail than anything I would think), so I am not questioning attempting semantic page design, what I am currently mulling over, is dropping the review and revision process of making a partially semantic page, fully semantic in hopes of some return in the future.
On a practical level, some aspects of the semantic web are taking off:
1) Semantic markup helps search engines identify key content and improves keyword results.
2) Online identity is a growing concern, and semantic markup in links like rel='me' help to disambiguate these things. Autodiscovery of social connections is definitely upcoming. (Twitter uses XFN markup for all of your information and your friends, for example)
3) Google (and possibly others) are starting to pay attention to microformats like hCard and hCalendar to gather greater information about people and events going on. This feature is still on the "very new" list, but these microformats are useful examples of the semantic web.
It may take some time for it all to get there, but there are definite possible benefits. I wouldn't put a huge amount of effort into it these days, but its definitely worth keeping in mind when you're developing a site.
Yahoo and Google have both announced support for RDFa annotations in your HTML content. Check out Yahoo SearchMonkey and Google Rich Snippets. If you care about SEO and driving traffic to your site, these are good ways to get better search engine coverage today.
Additionally, the Common Tag vocabulary is an RDFa vocabulary for annotating and organizing your content using semantic tags. Yahoo and Google will make use of these annotations, and existing publishing platforms such as Drupal 7 are investigating adopting the Common Tag format.
I would say no.
The reason I would say this is that the current return for creating a fully semantic web page right now is practically zero. You will have to spend extra time and effort, and there is very little to show for it now.
Effort is not like investing, however, so doing it now has no practical advantage. If the semantic web does start to show potential, then you can always revisit it and tap into that potential later.
It should be friendly to search engines, but going further is not going to provide good ROI.
Furthermore, what are you selling? A lot of the purpose behind being semantic beyond being indexable is easier 3rd party integration and data mining (creating those ontologies). Are these desirable traits for your data sets? If you are selling advertisement, making it easier for others to pull in your content is probably not going to be helpful.
It's all about where you want to spend your time.
You shouldn't do anything without a requirement. Otherwise, how do you know if you've succeeded? Do you have a requirement for being semantic? How much? How do you measure success? How do you measure return on investment?
Don't do anything just because of fads, unless keeping up with fads is a requirement.
Let me ask you a question - would you live in a house or buy a car that wasn't built according to a spec?
"So is this 4x4 lumber, upheld with a steel T-Beam?"
"Nope...we managed to rig the foundation on on PVC Piping...pretty cool, huh."