SEO Meta Data Meta Tags Meta Key Words And Meta Descriptions

In early 2008, Yahoo! announced that its web crawler would begin to process microformats
and other forms of structured metadata, making it available to developers as a
way to present richer search results.a For example, instead of a blue link and a plain
text abstract, a search result for an electronic gizmo could contain a thumbnail of the
device, its price, its availability, reviews, and perhaps a link to buy it immediately. The
greater the percentage of search results that take advantage of metadata (from any search
engine), the greater interest site owners have in structuring their sites accordingly.
Metadata generally means machine-readable “data about data,”which can take many
forms. Perhaps the simplest form falls under the classification of microformats,b which
can be as simple as a single attribute value such as nofollow, described in more detail
in “Step 10: Build Inbound Links with Online Promotion,”earlier in this chapter.
Another popular single-attribute microformat is XFN,c which allows individual links to
be labeled as connections on a social graph, with values such as acquaintance, coworker,
spouse, or even sweetheart. A special value of me indicates that a link points to
another resource from the same author, as in the following example:
<a href=”myothersite.example.com” rel=”me”>Homepage</a>
Some microformats expose more structure, particularly to represent people and events
and to review information, all of which can help make sites more presentable in semantic
search engines. For example, a social network might expose a personal profile using
hCard,d the microformat equivalent of the vCard address book standard.

Microformats are great for this sort of thing, but it is fairly easy for the structured data
needs of a site to run beyond what’s covered by a microformat specification.
RDF, the Resource Description Framework,f is (as the name suggests) a general framework
for metadata not tied to any particular syntax or representation. The main concept
mirrors that of a statement, often called a triple because it encompasses a subject (what
you talk about), a predicate (some property of the subject), and an object (the value of the
property). For example, in plain language one might say that “this book is written by Andy
King,”which demonstrates a subject, predicate, and object, respectively. By breaking
down knowledge into small, statement-size chunks and using URIs to stand for resources
and relationships between them, you can express nearly any fact or opinion imaginable.