Announced on June 2nd, Google, Bing, and Yahoo introduced schema.org – a structured data markup language for web pages. Similar to the trio’s pervious 2006 sitemaps.org release, schema.org is their next collaborative effort to bring a more universal process of communicating with search engines.

Schema.org is meant to further support the push for a universal approach to communicating with search engines, as it will allow Google, Bing and Yahoo to create a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages – hence the term schema. “Schema” derives from the Greek language and means “to shape.”

The schema.org site will act as a one-stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages, to help search engines better understand their websites. Likewise, the markup types may be used for future improvements to help people find your content more easily when searching.

In essence, the markup language contains little data tidbits for web elements, such as restaurant ratings and reviews, movies and locations, and even cooking times for recipes.

Both Google and Yahoo have supported structured markup for a couple years now and schema.org has elements both Yahoo’s longtime Search Monkey project and Google’s rich snippets. However, schema.org contains a lot of new markup types from the pervious data projects.

The site offers more than 100 new types of structured data. It also ported over all of the existing rich snippets types. Here are a few of the more popular types:

• Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
• Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
• Event
• Organization
• Person
• Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant
• Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
• Review, AggregateRating

According to Google, they expect to see an influx in adoption with this latest co-sponsored release:

“Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.” http://goo.gl/gXt9M

Optimizing your web page’s meta tags come with a few additional considerations besides keyword selection. In this blog post, lets discuss some Best Practices for optimizing your meta tags for search engine crawlers.

1). The Title Tag – The Title tag is among the most important factors Search Engine Crawlers look for in SEO. It is meant to define what your page is all about, for both search engine crawlers and users who are searching for your site in either Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Here is an image to see how your title tag appears in the search index.

It is an SEO best practice to keep your title tag to 70 characters long, including spaces.

2). The Description Tag – The Description tag is also an important factor for SEO. The description tag should reinforce the title tag and provide a little more information about the page to both the crawler and the user who is searching for your site. When writing your description tag, make sure to include your chosen keywords for the page and clearly define what the pages are  about. Also be sure your sentences are grammatically correct, as users will be reading the description in their search results, as the example image below will show. 

The SEO best practice length for the description tag is roughly 150-180-characters, including spaces.

3). The Keyword Tag – The Keyword Tag is currently not accounted for by search engines, so stuffing a bunch of words you want to rank for is not going to help. A good practice would be to include the keyword or key phrase you are optimizing the page for, just in the event that one day Google makes a change and starts to again account for the keyword tag in their algorithm.   

Once you have selected your keywords, following these guidelines will ensure you are using Best Practices for optimizing your meta content. There is no need to over-do-it when writing meta content. Simply do your best to optimize each page with a single and unique keyword or phrase. Make sure each page has unique meta tags related to that keyword and you will likely see increases in your rankings.

Any good webmaster that has a predilection for a well optimized site should always be perusing Google Webmaster Central (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) for the latest Google features. These updates on their blog are really useful for keeping up on the current innovations from the worlds most popular search engine.

Some recent blog posts of note include:

1. Search queries with top pages: This post announces the addition of the ability for site owners to use Webmaster Tools to analyze impression, click, and position data for their top pages.
2. More queries show additional results from a domain: Instead of the usual 2 results for a type of search query, Google will now serve around 4, meaning that some sites will have much more of a presence for exact name matches for their company name or brand.
3. Control crawling and indexing of your site: Google has created a new subdomain, http://code.google.com/, which explains, in a lot of detail, about how to correctly set up a site’s robots.txt file and robots meta tags.

It can sometimes be a daunting task to sift through all of the information on the Internet about how Google wants you to design your site when it comes to indexing and ranking. Webmaster Central is a useful resource if you are on the fence about designing your site for SEO.