HTML Tags & Schema
This single video could easily become an entire course. The lecture is basically concerned with the code behind the page. This is an important part of On-Site SEO; indeed, it’s so important that if this is botched there is no way a site will ever rank well.
If HTML Tags and Schema are so important, why are they not in a separate course? Because we will give you the resources you need to find the information to make your site work. To be fair, you’ll spend more time with the websites presented here than you will with the lecture.
The tags are fairly straightforward:
- Description
- Keywords
- Language
- Alt (Image) Tags
- Robots & XML Sitemap
This is a bit of a dangerous area for the unwary. Think about a photographer’s website: he may well talk about the beautiful brides in the photographs more than he will about his photography. Because the search engines can’t see the photographs, they are left with the captions. If the wedding photographer describes the dresses, Google may well think the site is about weddings & brides. Not only does this really happen, it's more common than you would think!
The other area we cover is Schema, or structured data. This is a fairly new area for website design and its only become central within the last year. If you don’t understand Schema, don’t be upset, Google swears it is not a ranking signal.
Repeat the same process with all the search engine map offerings. Don't forget Apple Maps! (mapsconnect.apple.com) Several of these places now allow you to buy an upgraded listing (ad) so you may want to look into pricing. That will get you higher profile than your competitors.
The idea is that the search engines want to avoid a situation like with the photographer above by having website designers add tags behind the page that categorizes the various elements within the page. So the Schema let's the search engines know what the site is about, regardless of what they think the text says.
Where structured data really comes to the fore is for dates and events. The search engines will list these events right in the search results if they are properly marked-up. There are maybe two-hundred of these tags and the entire technique is new, so its still fluid. Meaning that there are still two competing standards that almost work together. At this writing schema.org looks to be the winner mostly because it has Google’s backing.
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