Some see SEO as an online version of Calvinball, where everybody’s just making it up as they go along and none of the rules are written down. We tweak our content for keywords and add all our meta tags hoping the search engines will interpret what we did and file our site away under the terms we’re targetting. Sometimes it just feels like a cargo cult to me, and I work in the industry!
Google and Microsoft (Bing) understand our pain, they really do, and they teamed up to bring us a standard language for telling them exactly what a site, a page, and even an individual piece of content on a page is about. The schema.org family of microformats leverage HTML5 features to annotate your content & reach more customers.
Bing is the only search engine actively using this data, and Straight North’s experiments have shown pages rising in the search result rankings after having schema.org microdata on our site for just a month.
“Bing’s results greatly differed from the Google results. Microdata had a huge impact on Bing rankings. Before microdata, we weren’t even ranked in Bing for most of the keywords in the experiment. At the conclusion of the experiment, we were ranked on the first page of search results in Bing for nearly half of the keywords. Out of 48 keywords, fifteen increased in rank while only one decreased. The other 32 did not change. Thirteen of the keywords that were previously not ranked are now being ranked in organic search results.” – http://blog.straightnorth.com/the-impact-of-microdata-on-organic-search-rankings/
Dave will discuss various schema.org formats available and show examples of how easily schema.org formats can be integrated into custom WordPress themes and widgets. He will also demonstrate tools from Bing and Google for verifying how the search engines will interpret your schema.org markup.
