Glenn Jones

People using a generic term ‘rich snippets’ for markup data, but there are several different types:

Microformats

Mark up data with pre existing attributes of HTML.

Full example of a recipe in Microformat

Microdata

A method of marking up data with HTML 5 attributes.

Full example of a recipe in Microdata

RDFa

A method of marking up data with custom attributes and namespaces. Complex but flexible.

Full example of a recipe in RDFa

See full

Microformats vs Microdata/RDFa

Microformats are simple, easy to use.

Useful for events, products etc. Pages with video etc, use microdata to describe objects that are unusual.

Marking up a Yorkshire Pudding recipe

• Look at Recipe on microformats.org.
• Add the top level class around the HTML containing your data.
• One property can live inside another.
• A property can have child properties.
• A property can take data from the text of an element or another attribute.

Things Glenn is asked most: How does this effect SEO?

Answer: Suspects is a signal but more importantly is CTR can see improvement of 10% – 20% when rich snippets are present in search results.

Further reading and tools

http://schema.org/

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Phillip Sheldrake – Future SEO Vistas – the Semantic Web and the Internet of Things

Philip Sheldrake

A quick summary of Philip Sheldrake‘s talk at Brighton SEO.

Philip opened with his take on “Web 3.0″ (he has a ™ pending!) aka The Semantic Web.

In parts, quite a technical talk touching on this huge subject. A brief summary of “linked data” was given:

“In computing, linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried”

The basic premise being that individual resources can be linked, based upon which other resources they “know” about.

When we work with millions of URLs (resources) we can build up the “big picture” of how all this data is interlinked.

To what degree do search engines base their results on this concept?

Instance linkages within the linking open data datasets

Linked data gives us a good insight in to how huge data sets (i.e. millions of websites) can be linked, how they interact, and the relations between each can be shown in a clearer way.

A graphical representation of a linked data set can be shown (similar to above) great for us humans, but also on a machine level the relations are easier for computers to understand.

A great video on the subject here: