Time to use XML Schema – Helps search engines to better crawl the Web Pages

Today, we are going to talk about an Interesting Mark-up Language i.e. XML Schema – An advanced mode of describing an XML document containing data and other elements in order to facilitate search engines to better crawl the web pages. It normally contains the elements, data type, attributes, constraints and much more. It was earlier in 2009 when Google first started to show the rich snippet in search results which was enhanced by structured mark-up Language, Schema is similar mark-up language which will help the search engines better crawl the web pages, so is to better display them in search results. The most important thing about Schema is that it is adopted by all major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and even there is a huge possibility of other search engine will join the race in a near future.

Google though use to support three different standards for structured data mark-up basically microdata, microformats, and RDFa, but here Schema is based on Microdata. Well, hope now you will be interested to learn what this Microdata is, than in a simple language it is an attempt to interpret HTML elements with machine readable tags. Its basic purpose is to help technologies such as search engines, web crawlers to better understand what information is contained in a web page. Let us check some of attributes of microdata.

Itemscope : It creates the item and specifies particular elements contains information about it

Itemtype: It contains the URL of an Item

Itemid: Creates an unique identity number of an Item

Itemprop: All other important properties of an Item can be described through this tag

Newbie’s may find it difficult to understand it, so let us discuss it with an example. Hope many of you might be familiar with HTML tags and its functionality. Normally html tag instructs web browser how to display particular information included in the tag.

For example: <h1>Avatar</h1> - this tag instructs browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn't give any additional information about what that text string means—"Avatar" could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.

The use of XML schema will bring solution to all these question and helps search engines to better crawl webpages.

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