The three major search engines, Google, Bing and Yahoo! have decided to come together for a common purpose. They have jointly introduced a collection of HTML tags called schemas, which will help webmasters to markup HTML pages in order to improve their website optimisation.
This initiative will make it possible for publishers to put in structured markup on their web pages in order to help the search engines index their sites better and hence deliver better search results to users.
Schemas are essentially common sets of tags used to denote detailed data to be used to describe the publisher’s product.
Since Bing, Google and Yahoo! have initiated this protocol jointly, it will make it easier for the publisher to provide this data to the main search engines. In other words, Schema.org works as a one stop shop for webmasters to add in the most search engine friendly markup for data contained on their web pages.
Google had already introduced a similar service, called rich snippets, a couple of years ago. This service allowed users to receive non-textual information such as reviews, personal profiles, local business information or details about the product they were searching, in addition to the regular plain text snippet that accompanies each organic search listing.
Now that Google, Bing and Yahoo! have made a combined effort to improve their users’ search experience, it should pay rich dividends to all concerned – the user, the publisher and the search engine as well.
In the past, the major search engines had come together in 2006 to provide a common standard to webmasters for sitemaps.
About the Author
Farhad is the Group CEO of AccuraCast. With over 20 years of experience in digital, Farhad is one of the leading technical marketing experts in the world. His specialities include digital strategy, international business, product marketing, measurement, marketing with data, technical SEO, and growth analytics.
