Doing a little digging around in Google’s Webmaster Tools I found something interesting in regards to how they suggest doing meta tags: Google’s description, and YouTube video. What I found interesting, is that it somewhat resembled microformatting in regards to how they are now suggesting doing the description meta tag. Google wants more than a lump of a website. It wants it structured, and it wants all of a websites common identifiable specifics.

Your Visitors Want You to Be More Structured

A well structured website is an easy to make consistent website. Visible consistency works wonders with human visitors. Why stop being structured for just humans though? Adding some logical consistency to your website could work wonders for archiving robots like Google. It’s also that logical consistency that Google is starting to dig its teeth into. Regulars to BWI know that I swear by the proper use of heading tags. This could be your first step to a more structured site if you are not using them already. There is more to having a logical structure to your site than outlining it with heading tags though.

Rich Snippets and Meta Descriptions

However you want to describe a schematic website, it simply won’t happen unless your sites code has the hidden consistencies that only a  computer will read. Your content needs to be revealed to those bots, and they want it in a specific way that they understand. Putting all of your content into a big pot, and seeing what boils to the top is not good enough anymore. Rich snippets will help organize your content for search engines.

Rich Snippets

A few years ago it became well popularized on how search engines liked heading tags, but when I recently saw that Google is now supporting what they call Rich Snippets, I saw they were after more. They didn’t just want your keywords organized, they want an archive of your data, and they want it well organized to common specifics that other websites use as well.

A rich snippet is how Google refers to RDFs and microformats. Content using microformats for example, can be better defined for search engines like Google. An example of its benefit would be if I spelled YouTube as YouTobe. A human would know I am talking about YouTube because they see it as a spelling error. Using a microformat to specify that particular span of content is indeed a website, Google might be able to identify this as a spelling error, but more importantly, it will at least know that I was referencing a website even though it was not hyperlinked.

Example of microformats in use:

<span class=”reviewer vcard”>

<p>by <span class=”fn”>Robert Campbell</span>

at <span class=”org”>Best Web Image</span></p>

</span>

The class identifiers are what give Google that extra bit of data. The class “org” in the example above is not decided by me. This is a known microformat that everyone would need to use to identify the organization or company name.

Can’t this mix up your CSS file? You bet, so watch what you are doing. This could be a negative to microformats, but they are so easy to use, I think they will win out over RDFs. I simply defined my CSS file to make those spans presents themselves they way I like. That is one more check to site wide consistency! Read more about how to use structured data and rich snippets.

Your Meta Description

When visiting Google’s page about how to write a description meta tag, I saw the icing on the cake in terms of Google’s quest. Besides giving Google a short description, they are now asking for a bit more, or at least allowing a bit more. This is a great if you are selling a product, and it’s those descriptions that get displayed in search results. Google not only suggests giving the short description, but to also include some extras like:  product name, category, prices, title, and so on.

So for example of an improved Meta Tag for your pages description imagine you were selling the book, Attack of the Killer Shrews. Instead of letting Google figure out whether you were selling a DVD or book, your description could hold the most powerful content on your page by doing it like below.

Make the meta description like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”A story of killer, man eating shrews, Title: Attack of the Killer Shrews, Author: Not me, Category: Books, Price $1.99, Length: 100 pages, Rating: 1 out of 5 stars” />

Hopefully now, you can see what Google is going for here. They want your data, and they want it organized. Don’t just give them a lump of a website, it’s too hard to figure out.

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