Websites
Are Designed To Be Used By Humans:
Most
websites are designed to be used by humans. If
done correctly, a search engine or eCommerce aggregator
is often able to spider through a site and index
the content.
But
some things that are really easy for humans, can
be particularly difficult for machines to sort
through.
For
example, what is the price of the item? Who is
the manufacturer? What type of product is this
(i.e. category)?
A
human can identify these easily.
RDFa Tags:
I've
been part of a World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) working group that
focuses on the Resource Description Framework.
Essentially, this group has created standards
that allow sites to adopt RDF in easy-to-use ways.
As an aside, I was part of an email thread with
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide
Web.
What's
RDFa? In a nutshell, you can place tags around
specific content items (i.e. the price, the product
name, manufacturer name), and when a search engine
or eCommerce aggregator visits the site, they
will be able to understand what all of the content
means.
Typical
Product Grid on eCommerce Site:
Here's
an example of a product grid, courtesy of the
DiscountDecorating.com
Website:
A
human is able to easily figure out the price,
the fact that the image reflects the product information
and that the manufacturer is Blue Mountain.
But
each site is laid out very differently. Another
website lists the product details in a similar
fashion (same image), but is laid out differently:
(This
site is not RDFa tagged.)
What's
an eCommerce Aggregator or Search Engine To Do?
Sites
that want to have their content searched and indexed
by eCommerce Aggregators or search engines like
Google, can use RDFa tags to identify key areas
of content on the site.
For
example, here's the product name, that has a specfic
span class surrounding it:
Here's the product price, tagged appropriately
(sometimes it's tough to know what is the suggested
retail price, discounted amount or sale price:
There's
a bit more to the RDFa tagging than this, but
if you're interested, we can help.
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