One of the sites I develop has lots of information linked between each other; we have companies, we have products for those companies. The company page links to the page listing the products for that company, and vice versa.
From the HTML spec:
CITE:
Contains a citation or a reference to other sources.
Does this imply that I could (semantically) use a <cite> for a company link? What about on the company page to a product?
If not, could someone tell me what might be the "correct" semantic tag for this?
If you're just linking to other pages then semantically you should just use <a href=...>. If you're quoting a small piece of information, like the information from the HTML spec in your question, and providing a link to the original source, you might use <cite>. Think of it as a citation in a book or research paper.
I'm not sure that cite is intended to mark up links - you may be looking at something akin to a more professional (less inter-personal) XFN using the rel attribute of the link.
Cite is more for marking up titles of articles or other created work.
XFN is specifically for marking up the relationship you (or your company) have with the person or company you are linking to. What I'm not sure of is what xfn values there are (if any) for company links.
http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/xfn
What you might consider is in what detail will the information be used? Semantic markup, although a noble direction to head in, is not yet utilised to it's full extent when looking at (by a human) or parsing (by a program) a resource.
Related
I'm describing a site for distance education with schema.org and JSON. Any pages are with this:
<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage">
but I have many pages for every course - German course, Economics course, Hairdressing course etc. (Product pages) and I was described them with
<body itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ItemPage">
How is better to describe them - with WebPage or with ItemPage ?
In schema.org the description for ItemPage is "A page devoted to a single item, such as a particular product or hotel." I am not sure what is better. Please help.
Thanks
If the page is about a single course, then yes, you may use ItemPage.
As a general rule, always go with the most specific type. So if you have a WebPage, check its "More specific Types"; if one of the types applies to your case, select it; otherwise, keep WebPage.
Of course this type only represents the web page about your course, not the course itself. So you’d probably want to use mainEntity to reference an EducationEvent (or whichever type applies).
I understand why and how to use Schema.org to add microdata to your site, this is not a question about that. The question is why Schema.org has support for certain things that can be marked up with simple HTML5. Among these are
Types
WebPage and WebSite
I can see why WebPage and WebSite would be needed, for example, to reference the page/site of a certain organization in a link, but there's no need to mark up your own page with this—the <html> tag does this.
SiteNavigationElement
Why not just use <nav>?
Table
Just use <table>.
properties
WebPage/mainContentOfPage
<main> element
WebPage/relatedLink
<link> element inside <head>
This answer is primarily about the WebPageElement types (like SiteNavigationElement).
For WebPage, see my answer to the question Implicity of web page structure in Schema.org (tl;dr: it can be useful to provide WebPage, even for the current page).
For WebSite, similar reasons from the answer above apply. HTML doesn’t allow you to state something about the whole site (and, by the way, a Google rich result makes use of this type).
Schema.org is not restricted to HTML5.
Schema.org is a vocabulary which can be used with various syntaxes (like JSON-LD, Microdata, RDFa, Turtle, …), stand-alone or in various host languages (like HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0/1.1, (X)HTML5, XML, SVG, …). So having other ways to specify that something is (or: is about; or: represents) a site-wide navigation, a table etc. is the exception rather than the rule.
But there can be reasons to use these types even in HTML5 documents, for example:
The HTML5 markup and the annotations from Microdata/RDFa are two "different worlds": a Microdata/RDFa parser is only interested in the annotations, and after successfully parsing a document, the underlying markup is of no relevance anymore (e.g., the information that something was specified in a table element is lost in the Microdata/RDFa layer).
By using types like WebPageElement, you can specify metadata that is not possible to specify in plain HTML5. For example, the author/license/etc. of a table.
You can use these types to specify data about something which does not exist on the current document, e.g., you could say on your personal website that you are the author of a table in Wikipedia.
That said, these are not typical use cases relevant for a broad range of authors. Unless you have a specific reason for using them, you might want to omit them. They are not useful for typical websites. Using them can even be problematic in some cases.
See also my Schema.org issue The purpose of WebPageElement and mainContentOfPage, where I suggested to deprecate WebPageElement and the mainContentOfPage property.
Just use <table>.
You seem to be reading the title of the pages and no further. The <table> tag doesn't have the dozens of special properties listed on that page like isFamilyFriendly or license or timeRequired.
Schema.org microdata is intended to build a standard set of additional, semantic metadata that can be used by automated systems - search engine spiders, parser robots, etc. - to better understand the nature and features of the content.
Microdata with Schema.org already better describes any element than HTML5, it seems redundant? For example:
<nav itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
<!-- might as well just be... -->
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SiteNavigationElement">
and
<article itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/NewsArticle">
<!-- might as well just be... -->
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/NewsArticle">
Some elements create an "outline" for the webpage, but aside from that what's the point? Why not just use divs and forget about the semantic tags, and just use Microdata and Schema.org?
The schema.org definitions are specifically for applications such as search engines (From What is schema.org?):
This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that
webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major
search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and
Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results,
making it easier for people to find the right web pages.
Your mark-up needs to be understood by browsers and screen-readers as well as search engines (from the schema.org Getting started page):
Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information
included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to
display the text string "Avatar" in a heading 1 format. However, the
HTML tag doesn't give any information about what that text string
means—"Avatar" could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it
could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more
difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content
to a user.
So microdata allows you to add additional semantic meaning to your mark-up (using definitions provided by schema.org) which can be ignored by applications which don't need it, such as browsers, and read by applications which do, such as search engines.
Microdata is not a replacement for using the appropriate semantic-HTML tags where available, it should be used to augment that information. So the simple reason to use nav and article tags along with the microdata is that these tags have meaning to browsers and screen-readers, while the microdata does not.
Actually, your examples are fairly simplistic. I would suggest you have a look at some of the examples on the schema.org getting started page to see how microdata can be used more meaningfully.
To see microdata being used in practice, try googling yourself and inspecting the results. If I search for myself, the first three results (LinkedIn, github and my portfolio page) all display information marked up using microdata which google can pull from the pages and present to the user to help provide more meaningful search results.
The vast majority of terms that we have in schema.org have no overlap with HTML terminology, since they represent kinds of real world thing such as places, processes, products etc.
The problem area highlighted here is the small set of terms around http://schema.org/WebPageElement . I am not aware that any current search engine features make specific use of these, and I would suggest that any publishers who do see value in their use should also employ the corresponding pure HTML markup as well.
In term of SEO, if I want to group relevant page content together to maximize search engine readability, should I use the tag <nav> or <article>?
1) It's not there yet.
2) If it was, and you were wrapping menus as article, or wrapping affiliate link-farms as article, Google would slap you (keep that in mind in three or four years).
3) If you have lots of legitimate content, and each piece of content is self-contained (ie: suitable for article), then not only should you wrap it in an article tag, but you should also learn how to use Google's "Rich Snippet Tool", which was recently renamed "Structured Data Tool".
If you learn how to mark things up, both in an html5-friendly way, and in a Google-friendly microformat, then GoogleBot will grab all of the content it knows how, and it will be displayed in search results and elsewhere, when relevant.
Like I said... ...that's if you've got content which is worthy of doing this, because otherwise, Google will slap you, eventually, if you try to use it for evil.
article tag:-
The tag allows to mark separate entries in an online publication, such as a blog or a magazine. It is expected that when articles are marked with the tag, this will make the HTML code cleaner because it will reduce the need to use tags. Also, probably search engines will put more weight on the text inside the tag as compared to the contents on the other parts of the page.
nav tag:-Navigation is one of the important factors for SEO and everything that eases navigation is welcome. The new tag can be used to identify a collection of links to other pages.
so both tag have their own functionality which can be implemented according to need.
I know that Google’s search algorithm is mainly based on pagerank. However, it also does analysis and uses the structure of the document H1, H2, title and other HTML tags to enhance the search results.
What is the name of this technique "using the document structure to enhance the search results"?
And are there any academic papers to help me study this area?
The fact that Google is taking the HTML structure into account is well covered in SEO articles however I could not find it in the academic papers.
I think it's called "Semantic Markup"
[...] semantic markup is markup that is descriptive enough to allow us and the machines we program to recognize it and make decisions about it. In other words, markup means something when we can identify it and do useful things with it. In this way, semantic markup becomes more than merely descriptive. It becomes a brilliant mechanism that allows both humans and machines to “understand” the same information. http://www.digital-web.com/articles/writing_semantic_markup/
A more practical article here
http://robertnyman.com/2007/10/29/explaining-semantic-mark-up/
SEO has become almost a religion to some people where they obsess about minutiae. Frankly, I'm not convinced that all this effort is justified.
My advice? Ignore what so-called pundits say and just follow Google's guidelines.
You might be looking for an academic answer but honestly, this isn't an academic question beyond the very basics of how Web indexing works. The reality of a modern page indexing and ranking algorithm is far more complex.
You may want to look at one of the earlier works on search engines. Note the authors' names. You may also want to read Google Patent application 20050071741.
These general principles aside, Google's search algorithm is constantly tweaked based on actual and desired results. The exact workings are a closely guarded secret just to make it harder for people to game the system. Much of the "advice" or descriptions on how Google's search algorithm works is pure supposition.
So, apart from having a title and having well-formed and valid HTML, I don't think you're going to find what you're looking for.
Google very deliberately doesn't give away too much information about its search algorithm, so it's unlikely you will find a definitve answer or academic paper that confirms this. If you're interested from an SEO point of view, just write your pages so they are good for humans and the robots will like them too.
To make a page good for humans, you SHOULD use tags such as h1, h2 and so on to create a hierarchical page outlay... a bit like this...
h1 "Contact Us"
...h2 "Contact Details"
......h3 "Telephone Numbers"
......h3 "Email Addresses"
...h2 "How To Find Us"
......h3 "By Car"
......h3 "By Train"
The difficulty with your question is that if you put something in your h1 tag hoping that it would increase your position in Google, but it didn't match up with other content on your page, you could look like you are spamming. Similarly, if your page is made up of too many headings and not enough actual content, you could look like you are spamming. It's not as simple as add a h1 and h2 tag and you'll go up! That's why you need to write websites for humans, not robots.
I have found this paper:
A New Study on Using HTML Structures to Improve Retrieval
however it is an old paper 1999,
still looking for more recent papers.
Check out
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/pan.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l22811484243r261/
Some time spent on scholar.google.com might help you find what you are looking for
You can also try searching the 'Computer Science' section of arXiv: http://arxiv.org for "search engine" and the various terms that others have suggested.
It contains many academic papers, all freely available... hopefully some of them will be relevant to your research. (Of course the caveat of validating any paper's content applies.)
Like cletus said follow the google guidelines.
I did a few tests came to the conclusion that title, image alt and h tags the most important. Also worth to mention is google adsense. I had the feeling if you implement these, the rank of your site increase.
I believe what you are interested in is called structural-fingerprinting, and it is often used to determine the similarity of two structures. In Google's case, applying a weight to different tags and applying to a secret algorithm that (probably) uses the frequencies of the different elements in the fingerprint. This is deeply routed in information theory - if you are looking for academic papers on information theory, I would start with "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon
I would also suggest looking at Microformats and RDF's. Both are used to enhance searching. These are mostly search engine agnostic, but there are some specific things as well. For google specific guidelines for HTML content read this link.
In short; very carefully. In long:
Quote from anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual erb search engine:
[...] This gives us some limited
phrase searching as long as there are
not that many anchors for a particular
word. We expect to update the way that
anchor hits are stored to allow for
greater resolution in the position and
docIDhash fields. We use font size
relative to the rest of the document
because when searching, you do not
want to rank otherwise identical
documents differently just because one
of the documents is in a larger
font. [...]
It goes on:
[...] Another big difference between
the web and traditional well controlled collections is that there
is virtually no control over what
people can put on the web. Couple
this flexibility to publish anything
with the enormous influence of search
engines to route traffic and companies
which deliberately manipulating search
engines for profit become a serious
problem. This problem that has not
been addressed in traditional closed
information retrieval systems. Also,
it is interesting to note that
metadata efforts have largely failed
with web search engines, because any
text on the page which is not directly
represented to the user is abused to
manipulate search engines. [...]
The Challenges in a web search engine addresses these issues in a more modern fashion:
[...] Web pages in HTML fall into the middle of this continuum of structure in documents, being neither close to free text nor to well-structured data. Instead HTML markup provides limited structural information, typically used to control layout but providing clues about semantic information. Layout information in HTML may seem of limited utility, especially compared to information contained in languages like XML that can be used to tag content, but in fact it is a particularly valuable source of meta-data in unreliable corpora such as the web. The value in layout information stems from the fact that it is visible to the user [...]:
And adds:
[...] HTML tags can be analyzed for what semantic information can be inferred. In addition to the header tags mentioned above, there are tags that control the font face (bold, italic), size, and color. These can be analyzed to determine which words in the document the author thinks are particularly important. One advantage of HTML, or any markup language that maps very closely to how the content is displayed, is that there is less opportunity for abuse: it is difficult to use HTML markup in a way that encourages search engines to think the marked text is important, while to users it appears unimportant. For instance, the fixed meaning of the tag means that any text in an HI context will appear prominently on the rendered web page, so it is safe for search engines to weigh this text highly. However, the reliability of HTML markup is decreased by Cascading Style Sheets which separate the names of tags from their representation. There has been research in extracting information from what structure HTML does possess.For instance, [Chakrabarti etal, 2001; Chakrabarti, 2001] created a DOM tree of an HTML page and used this information to in-crease the accuracy of topic distillation, a link-based analysis technique.
There are number of issues a modern search engine needs to combat, for example web spam and blackhat SEO schemes.
Combating webspam with trustrank
Webspam taxonomy
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
But even in a perfect world, e.g. after eliminating the bad apples from the index, the web is still an utter mess because no-one has identical structures. There are maps, games, video, photos (flickr) and lots and lots of user generated content. In other word, the web is still very unpredictable.
Resources
Hypertext and the web:
Extracting knowledge from the World Wide Web
Rich media and web 2.0
Thresher: automating the unwrapping of semantic content from the World Wide Web
Information retrieval
Webspam papers
Combating webspam with trustrank
Webspam taxonomy
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
To keep it painfully simple. Make your information architecture logical. If the most important elements for user comprehension are highlighted with headings and grouped logically, then the document is easier to interpret using information processing algorithms. Magically, it will also be easier for users to interpret. Remember the search engine algorithms were written by people trying to interpret language.
The Basic Process is:
Write well structured HTML - using header tags to indicate the most critical elements on the page. Use logical tags based on the structure of your information. Lists for lists, headers for major topics.
Supply relevant alt tags and names for any visual elements, and then use simple css to arrange these elements.
If the site works well for users and contains relevant information, you don't risk becoming a black listed spammer, and search engine algorithms will favor your page.
I really enjoyed the book Transcending CSS
for a clean explanation of properly structured HTML.
I suggest trying Google scholar as one of your avenues when looking for academic articles
semantic search
I found it interesting that - with no meta keywords nor description provided - in a scenatio like this:
<p>Some introduction</p>
<h1>headline 1</h1>
<p>text for section one</p>
Always the "text for section one" is shown on the search result page.
New tag to use called CANONICAL can now also be used, from Google, click HERE