RDFa: bring some meaning to your site!

26 February 2011

If you’re wondering how to make your site look better in Google’s search result page you are in the right place.

You have probably seen all these fancy recipes, that are available through Google. You can have that kind of attractive links to your site too. How to do that? Let the search engine (SE) understand what is the actual meaning of the information you have on your site. We will use RDFa for this purpose.

So the thing you need to do to help SE understand your site is mark specific type of information. For example if your site contains some information about certain people:

<div>
Mr. Bob Henderson is the CFO of Fiction Ltd. Friends call him Bob.
</div>

There is a huge amount of valuable information in these short sentences. For now, this information is not explicitly visible to SE.

<div xmlns:v="http://rdf.data-vocabulary.org/#" typeof="v:Person">
<span property="v:title">Mr.</span> 
<span property="v:name">Bob Henderson</span> 
is the <span property="v:role">CFO</span> of 
<span property="v:affiliation">Fiction Ltd</span>. 
Friends call him <span property="v:nickname">Bob</span>.
</div>

After inserting the code above not only human but also any good SE understands what is the meaning of the key words (like “CFO”, “Bob”) and their relationship to Bob Henderson. The semantic metadata is added in order for the SE to achieve better understanding of information.

This is only the very first step. Some say that it is the hardest step to make, but you should judge that on your own after studying these:

Enjoy!