RDF and SEO

*Note: unfortunately, due to the nature of RDF and microformats, this post is slightly technical - for those who aren't of that persuasion it might be best to speed read the bulk of the content and skip to the conclusion :)*

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a set of rules that enables a web page (actually, the various pieces of content on that page such as a person, an image, etc) to be described in a format that makes that content more accessible to search engines and other applications.

So, for example, if you were describing a person, as well as the content you'd see on the page, there'd be some "hidden" code that enables search engines to understand the content better.

It's good to see that RDF (or RDFa specifically) is beginning to be used by search engines more and more. If you Google for "Grease theatre tickets" you'll note that some of the results have the actual event details in the search engine results as opposed to the user having to find the relevant section on the website. This is because the content is available to Google in a format it understands.

Each type of content has a vocabulary and there is a number of on-going processes to formalise and agree these vocabularies.

Google has supported a few vocabularies for a while :

• Reviews
• People
• Businesses and organisations
• Events
• Recipes

(To read more about Google's approach to rich snippets as they call them, click here and for more technical stuff click here.)

We're long time advocates of structuring the web - we created Crawl Score way back in 2007 and it seems it was a bit ahead of it's time. We use Crawl Score to audit our client sites but have never really pushed it as a stand-alone product - time for a re-think I reckon :)

Anyway, the point of this blog post is to flag up that RDF can have a dramatic effect on the ranking of your website. By structuring your content correctly you are making it more accessible to Google (and other search engines / content aggregators) and therefore improving the chances of your website ranking well.

If your site is selling products or is tied to geographic areas then adding RDF formatting can only be a good thing.

Today it's mainly Google that we're watching but once RDF is on more websites, we'll see content used in all sorts of different ways.

We've always held the view that the mobile web would not necessarily be via the browser and it turned out to be true (think iPhone apps) and we get the same feeling about RDF - it won't just be Google that you'll thank (or will be thanking you!), there'll be some very interesting uses of this newly structured web.

RDF will be a great leveller - one of the reasons Google is such a market leader is that they were able to make sense of unstructured content - that particular advantage will soon be gone and then we'll see how things pan out.

On one hand, you'd expect Google do to more with RDF - if the insisted on it then the vast majority of websites would comply but if I'm being cynical, because of the reasons stated above, perhaps they're dragging their feet?

So, what does this mean to me?

As a website owner, manager, marketeer you will need to understand how RDF can work for you. How it is used, verified and managed is a more detailed conversation (that we'd be happy to have!) - it's not as technical as it may at first seem - it makes perfect sense and can be integrated into most websites given some thought.