Adding semantic mark-up to optimise your webpages for search engine

We didn't have a meeting last week due to our AGM taking place later this month (for more details see our events page), so in lieu of that we have a guest post from Georgina Tarrant about her work as a Taxonomist. Great to to be able to showcase the varied landscape of the information profession! Take it away Georgina...

Hello, my name is Georgina Tarrant and I am a taxonomy specialist.  I have worked on yell.com for a number of years and during that time I observed a shift from using in-house business listings data to using third party taxonomies and data providers to help us to achieve our organisation goals.

One of the simplest and most effective of these projects was creating mappings between schema.org taxonomy headings and specific Yell.com classifications to improve the way our business profile pages are displayed in organic (i.e. free) search engine results using content mark-up.

Schema.org was chosen for this project as it is an open source taxonomy created collaboratively by Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Using the schema.org taxonomy creates semantic mappings that help search engines to make use of our content.  We started small – we simply added mark-up to our business listings pages which told the search engines that the page was about a local business.  We didn’t even say what type of business and yet this simple change led to a dramatic improvement in how our pages appeared in the automated summaries in search engine results.  Google have a test that web masters can use:

Website mark-up languages like HTML are used to specify how webpage content should be formatted.  Schema.org tags are different because they specify each different type of content on the page in a way that search engines can understand.  This enables us to control how our business profile pages are displayed in automated result summaries e.g. we can make sure that addresses and telephone numbers are correctly formatted as they are elements of the local business taxonomy term.

The next logical step was to tell the search engines what type of business each page was about.  The types of business were sub-categories of the local business heading.  My task was to create a new ontology structure to recreate the schema.org headings in and then to match them to the Yell.com classifications that each business was classified under.  Now Google and other search engines can tell when it is looking at the business listing page for a bakery and when it is looking at a restaurant or takeaway – hooray!  Adding the mark-up made it worthwhile having all of our extended content such as maps, user reviews and opening hours displayed correctly.

We started with local business and food establishment Schema headings but our intention was to roll this out across the whole yell.com classification set.  Hopefully this will improve our search engine rankings and make use of the rich content we have!

Phil Bradley comes to the Thames Valley

As one might expect, the turn-out for CILIP President and internet search extraordinaire Phil Bradley probably exceeded that of any event we have had before. So much so that we had to up sticks to a different location, just next door to our usual haunt to one of the conference rooms in the Reading RISC Global Cafe. Phil started by telling us about what he does as the President of CILIP and the structure of the upper echelons of the CILIP hierarchy. Basically he acts as a conduit between members and the Council and looks at the way CILIP is governed and whether this could be improved. He is continuing as President for another year due to the Vice-President stepping down and therefore not able to progress into the President role. They are currently looking for new Vice-President candidates so if any CILIP member is interested, do contact Phil.

Phil then moved on to the endlessly interesting subject of social media, of which he is and expert. As an enthusiastic amateur I can only presume to try and outline what I learnt from his talk! He told us that social media is not a tool, it is a transition, and the internet will just morph into something else after web 0.2, and something again after that. Many people are scared of how the web is developing because they don’t understand it and know how to use it to their advantage. This can include institutions, with IT departments restricting the use of certain platforms because this is deemed easier than trying to make them work well for the institution. The spectre of an irredeemable slip-up looms too large. The fact that many institutions don’t use these technologies actually says more about them than if they did allow their use. They conversations on these platforms will happen anyway, including those about their institution and if they do not use them they will miss out on being able to influence this.

The model of search engine results being compiled solely of traditional websites is now fundamentally broken. Searches are increasingly recalling interactions from social media, because these are the opinions of customers and users, they say more than a static website could about any institution or service. Increasingly it is individuals that are adding credibility to what is on the internet, it is the value of the people that you follow and increasingly we will find our information in the realms of our own virtual networks.

You can find a Slideshare presentation very similar to the one he used at our event here.