Structured Data: Follow-Up to Palegroove Blog Post

In the my previous post at Palegroove, "Improving your SEO with RSS in 3 easy steps," I shared some insight about how to setup your RSS feed URL's so that they are search engine friendly. After reading the post again, well, I missed explaining why search spiders like feeds so much.

The answer: structured data.

PC Magazine defines structured data as, "Data that resides in fixed fields within a record or file. Relational databases and spreadsheets are examples of structured data. Contrast with unstructured data." I'm sure a future revised version will include XML or RSS ;-).

When your content is placed into feeds it has the benefit of being described by a template - structured data. It is described by elements in the feed the same as mine, CNN.com, Apple, Microsoft or anyone else with a RSS feed. RSS is the ubiquitous, defacto standard for syndication. The simplicity of RSS as a standard to describe your content's title, description, dates, content, enclosures, etc makes it a magic API for search engines, developers and database administrators. Your website doesn't do this. It is full of unstructured data.

On your site the post titles could be in a h1-6 tag, div or a legacy table cell with a style applied to it. This makes it harder for search engines to understand your content. Sure, there are insanely engineered algorithms that are in place to create associations between the content on your site and the code that is used to display it, but RSS makes it uniform and much easier for search companies to cache, categorize, rank and re-syndicate your ideas. The primary reason is that the feed describes the data types instead ot telling a browser how to display it.

So, like I said in the last post, "Treat your feeds with the same care that you do your pages," with the caveat that maybe you need to treat them better because the next iteration of the web is being built on structured data.

Tags: semantic web  structured data  RSS SEO  rss feeds  seo  

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