WTF is the Semantic Web? (NB: it’s great for local!)
I can almost hear you thinking “Shit – what now - another thing I don’t have time to learn about!” but trust me – this is a good one!
Language
HTML – hyper text markup language – is what the techies add to your content to make it look right on the internet. Search engines evaluate on-page HTML to deliver results, however (and this is a big however) search engines are clueless as to what any of the content wrapped inside HTML means.
Search Sucks
OK – compared to 1995, search is pretty awesome, but if you think about the search process, entering a few words into a box and receiving a list of results, most of which are completely irrelevant, it isn’t the most efficient.
Sure it’s getting better with the rise of mobile and the growing importance of local, but wouldn’t it be better if the machine actually understood what you were looking for?
Web 3.0 / The Semantic Web
The next stage of markup language is to tell the machine what is inside the markup tags.
Instead of having:
Simply Friday - A content consulting company in Los Angeles
Which to the search engines looks like this:
<p><em>Simply Friday</em> - A content consulting company in Los Angeles</p>
You could have:
Simply Friday - A content consulting company in Los Angeles
Which to the search engine looks like this:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/LocalBusiness"><p><span itemprop="name"><em>Simply Friday</em></span> - <span itemprop="description">A content consulting company in Los Angeles.</span></p>Did you spot the difference?
Both versions look exactly the same to the human reader – but to the search engine – the second version is way, waaaaay, more informative.
Here we’ve used a scheme to actually tell the machine what kind of content is wrapped inside these tags – it knows that Simply Friday is actually the name of a local business and that it is a content consulting company in Los Angeles.
Skynet here we come
If you’d like to contribute to the acceleration of humanity’s demise and get your contact page optimized for local, reply to this email and book a session.