#markup

bellesbooks:

hardcover or paperback? bookstore or library? bookmark or receipt? stand alone or series? nonfiction or fiction? thriller or fantasy? under 300 pages or over 300 pages? children’s or ya? friends to lovers or enemies to lovers? read in bed or read on the couch? read at night or read in the morning? keep pristine or markup? cracked spine or dog ear?

Sometime back keywords were the holy grail of doing SEO along with the right kind of meta nomenclature.

Get the search query - align all kinds of keywords that are related to it, sprinkle those in copious amounts in your copy , tag the life out of it , and boom….Google would index it and throw it up in search results.

Experts went even one step further and defined the number of times a keyword could be repeated in every 100 words of an article to really make the copy stand out in search queries.

Those who couldn’t do anything, they just went and bid and paid a lot of money and bought the whole set of keywords and created a lot of ads.

But then it became a bit complicated…especially around a simple matter. Word and terminology context associated to the search query.

Let’s use as an  example - the word “Avatar”. 

Now there is that James Cameron movie called Avatar and then sometimes these days we create Avatar’s of our own self in online portals, and then again in vernacular language it can mean something totally different akin to gods and goddesses.

Question is which Avatar are you searching for and how does the Search Engine contextualise that search query to give the right and most relevant answer?

How do you ensure as creator of the movie Avatar, that your films website comes up tops?

Now some years back your website metadata and HTML structure would read something like this below:

<div> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>

The phrases like Science Fiction etc being the related keywords you want 

indexed.

Now let's decide the section of the page which actually talks about one item; that is defining the movie Avatar and lets define it using the "element" itemscope
Then it looks something like this:

<divitemscope> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954) </span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>


By adding Itemscope we have now specified that the HTML contained in the 
<div>...</div> block is about a particular item

But it's not all that helpful to specify that there is an item being discussed 

without specifying what kind of an item it is. So we can now specify the type of 

item using the itemtype attribute immediately after the itemscope.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>


This specifies that the item contained in the <div> is in fact a Movie, as defined in the schema.org type hierarchy. Item types are provided as URLs, in this case http://schema.org/Movie.

Now what additional information can we give search engines about the movie Avatar? Movies have interesting properties such as actors, director, ratings. To label properties of an item, we can use the itemprop attribute.

For example, to identify the director of a movie, lets add itemprop="director" to the element enclosing the director’s name. Let’s also for fun define the genre.

(There’s a full list of all the properties you can associate with a movie at http://schema.org/Movie.)

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop="director">James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div>

Note that we have added additional <span>...</span> tags to attach the itemprop attributes to the appropriate text on the page. <span> tags don’t change the way pages are rendered by a web browser, so they are a convenient HTML element to use with itemprop.

Search engines can now understand not just that http://www.avatarmovie.com is a URL, but also that it’s just the URL for the trailer for the science-fiction movie Avatar, which was directed by James Cameron. ( much more context right?- Much more defined search response?)

Sometimes the value of an item property can itself be another item with its own set of properties. For example, we can specify that the director of the movie is an item of type Person and the Person has the properties name and birthDate. To specify that the value of a property is another item, you begin a new itemscope immediately after the corresponding itemprop.

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name"&g;Avatar</h1> <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop="birthDate">August 16, 1954)</span> </div> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div>

This in short is the value of Schema’s and why they have become so important in Google’s Knowledge Graph and why it has changed the relevancy of keywords in driving SEO. For Google these days context matters more than keywords.

Here are a few notes to keep in mind when adding schema.org markup to your web pages.

• More is better, except for hidden text. In general, the more content you mark up, the better. However, as a general rule, you should mark up only the content that is visible to people who visit the web page and not content in hidden div’s or other hidden page elements.

• Expected types vs text. When browsing the schema.org types, you will notice that many properties have “expected types”. This means that the value of the property can itself be an embedded item (see section 1d: embedded items). But this is not a requirement—it’s fine to include just regular text or a URL. In addition, whenever an expected type is specified, it is also fine to embed an item that is a child type of the expected type. For example, if the expected type is Place, it’s also OK to embed a LocalBusiness

• Using the url property. Some web pages are about a specific item. For example, you may have a web page about a single person, which you could mark up using the Person item type. Other pages have a collection of items described on them. For example, your company site could have a page listing employees, with a link to a profile page for each person. For pages like this with a collection of items, you should mark up each item separately (in this case as a series of Persons) and add the url property to the link to the corresponding page for each item

So next time when your search agency comes with their list of keywords and meta tags, get your web developer and content writer as well. Sit together. Define the context and markup your page HTML with schemas. Painstakingly and with time. Use those keywords in the base HMTL program itself. Just writing more inane content with a mix of those words is not going to improve your ranking.

Not anytime soon.

Then start doing SEO.

PS: Oh and yes use a code compiler to test the code you write post markup before publishing.

bellesbooks:

hardcover or paperback? bookstore or library? bookmark or receipt? stand alone or series? nonfiction or fiction? thriller or fantasy? under 300 pages or over 300 pages? children’s or ya? friends to lovers or enemies to lovers? read in bed or read on the couch? read at night or read in the morning? keep pristine or markup? cracked spine or dog ear?