Anyone with a webpage trying to improve their SEO received a big hint of the way of things to come this week with the launch of Schema.org from search engine leaders Bing, Yahoo, and Google. Aimed, essentially, at making their own lives easier, the venture hopes to get website owners and designers to start using a predefined methodology to mark up their sites and thus make it easier to index and order them.
Laid out in depth on Schema.org, the system offers a number of defined HTML mark-up sets, one of each of a large number of types of common content. For example, pages offering structured information on people or companies, various types of media including TV, books and audio, places or things now have narrowly defined ways of using HTML mark-up to signify that information.
This means that when the search engines (and that includes pretty much all search engines if they so wish, not just these three giants) read this HTML, they can be very sure of the type of content the page contains, making indexing it much easier.
So this makes the search engines lives easier; how about web owners? Well, to start with, their lives will be harder; redoing a site in the new mark-up will be a time-consuming web design process. However, if it has the reward over time of improving results then it is likely to be an integral part of your SEO techniques, tips and tricks, and would be foolhardy to ignore. Of course, SEO basics will not be supplanted by this, but over time Schema.org is likely to become the default language for sites in order to get a basic search ranking.