Structured Data Markup For Seo

anyone have any experience with this, or with google's structured data markup helper??

im learning this for the first time and i have some questions:

1) i have an already existing website, am i going to have to comb through all the fuckin code to do this??

2) is this something you can even do to an existing website or do you have to do it at the programing stage?

3) will it actually help in terms of seo or am i wasting my time??

 

it would have to be done at the programming level of course, by adding to the code.

what you want is some code (a tool if you will) that will go through all of it and do this if its a large site, since it appears that doing this by jamd would be very time consuming and repetitive (also prone to errors).

idk it would help, theoretically it might. all that really is is extra markup for the search engines to see, or else some kind of script that gemerates it dynamically.

it kinda goes against my philosophy actually, as does most of the way things are done "on the web". i believe code should be purely functional, as short and simple as it can possibly be written. thats why the web got the way it is ... when everyone starts doing this (and they are) it amounts to little more than fluff that leads to slower, buggier pages cuz it only makes you stand out when everyone else isnt doing it. instead of adding code, its better to try to make the code even smaller ... i know this just isnt how its done on "the web" though cuz we p. developing is weird category of programming, kinda like programming mixed with marketing and becoming more and more focused on marketing so the dominant mentality is that of a marketer, rather than the mentality of a programmer.

 

http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

read that^ .. idk if it has anything relevant to you because i only read a tiny bit of it. its always best to know the theory of something before attempting to implement it, so i would read up on the theory of if and then maybe itll seem more clear. the whole idea seems kinda esoteric to me tho.

 

dude i knew you would help me ace, i was actually going to private message you specifically!!! lol

 

1. If your site isn't dynamically generated/template derived, yes.

2. It can be done to an existing HTML document, which you replace with the newly marked-up version. (Also: HTML is not programming. 'Scuse me for being pedantic.)

3. It will help you, but less than the SEO hucksters would have you believe.

My view: SDM should be a middling SEO priority. Do the bigger things first.

Tangentially: The Googod is a kind of SEO huckster. They lie about the marvels of their technology all the time, relying upon the fact that algorithm nerds are few and far between and text analysis algorithm nerds are fewer and farther between still. Googod can say just about anything about how their algorithms work because only insiders with non-disclosure agreements know the truth, and by saying lots and lots of stuff they keep people looking at them -- and not their competitors. Any major search engine will deliver up links to the information you want so product differentiation is really, really difficult, but calling attention to yourself is cheap, easy, and at least as effective until someone comes up with something truly superior.

 

im going to do this for multiple sites, do you think it would be better to write some kind of script that would generate the markups dynamically and then just add the script to all the sites?? is that kinda thing possible??

i think it would make my job easier. but then again, all my client websites are different, some are for services, some are products, and some are informational. maybe i can write one script for all sites that sell products and another script for sites that sell services???

 

what do you think the "bigger" things are in seo??


and what do you mean by product differentiation is really difficult but calling attention to yourself is cheap and easy? can you elaborate?

 

im gonna say that i would go that route before hand editing an entire site ... im sure stuff like thats been written already that you could use. im not sure exactly what it would entail since i dont do that sort of thing (web development) ... but whatever that is ... thats what you would need to make your code do to it. and thinking about trying to write that sortof makes me cringe actually, especially using C. oh yea, its definitely possible. who knows, by the time you got it done you might have the beginnings of a very simple web browser (an html parser at least).

i agree that HTML is not really "code" ... its a document markup language though in common parlance it is often referred to as such. i would say javascript and php on websites are definitely code though since they actually "do things" .. unless you dont consider scripting languages to be code be ause they dont compile to machine language and cant actually do anything by themselves either without a bunch of libraries most likely written in C. i do know that languaguages beginning with the letter C are code . i think the issue comes down to what you call a person who writes HTML? a person who writez code is a programmer, what do you call someone who writes html ... a "marker upper"?

as far as this SEO stuff ... if theres not an RFC or a Man page about it, then that oughtta tell you how important it is .. wait, i mean how important it "should" be

 

well im diving in and ill let you guys know how it goes, thanks for your help.

 

i had a dream once about the future ... everything was electronic of course and everything was done from "terminals" for lack of a better word. on the terminal screen you had a screen about the size of a normal monitor but only had a very tiny place in the middle that you could actually work from to see one or two lines at a time. the entire edges of the screen were covered with every sort of advertisement and these ads boxed in the screen basically giving you a very tiny usable screen. even atms were that way. what a waste of a screen.

 

any progress?

 

HTML may be "code" in common parlance in certain circles, but not any of which I'm a member. A programming language can compute a factorial (for example), but a markup language only defines presentational aspects of data. It's a pretty straightforward distinction, unlike programming versus scripting.

The dividing line between programming and scripting has become almost all blur by now. If I write something in perl and stuff it into an interpreter, I'm scripting by the old school (of which I am an alumnus) definition. But I can also compile the same source code to create an executable binary which will run on any machine of the same architecture without need of a perl interpreter, which is programming in the definition of that same old school. But if I write in java, I have to "compile" my source to make it something that can be run -- but it remains entirely dependent upon a java virtual machine to execute it, so is it programming? C is always programming... but there are C interpreters that take in C source code and do all of the parsing and lexing on every invocation, so isn't it scripting? Oh shit. I'm unable to distinguish between scripting and programming except when it's something like comparing a shell script to C++. But I've only been at it for 35 years so I've still got a lot to learn. (That's only partially a joke. I've been actively learning the whole time and don't see any end to it save mental incapacity or death.)

Someone who writes HTML is an author. An HTML author, or a web author, or something like that to distinguish them from Leo Tolstoy. I try to never be a dick about such things, but when an HTML author refers to it as programming I know I'm dealing with someone of limited technical knowledge. Which is fine, since creating web pages doesn't require extensive technical knowledge. I like to leave web design and authoring to people who dig it anyway, and spend my time on programming and system administration. Web design clients tend to suck, but not in a good way, more than software and systems clients anyway. Can you make it more red red?

Had you by any chance recently watched the movie Idiocracy when you had that dream?

 

I suppose the feasibilty of it would depend upon how consistent is your markup among all of the affected sites. If it's really very consistent and the bits that are site/page specific already exist, it'd be almost trivial. Otherwise the complexity would be at least proportional if not more like exponential to the degree of inconsistency. That's probably why Googod's tool is interactive rather than automagical.

 

yes this is what ive been looking into and looks like the easiest path. i use wordpress, so there are a few plugins that just insert the schema.org microdata with just a few clicks

i would like to learn programming but my business just happened to steer me in this direction, but i think im getting a good foundation for programming anyway.

 

thank-you, now i wont embarrass myself in real life, lol.

 

Oh! Yeah, using Wordpress the hot ticket is to use one of the plugins to get that job done. There are bigger bangs to be had anyway.

I actually got started on answering your questions about what the priorities ought to be (in my view) and what ultimately amounts to real differentiation versus the facade of it, but ran out of time -- those are big topics. Here are some shorter versions:

The single most important thing in SEO is keywords, which are now called "content". Content is far too generic a term, but it's more neutral because keywords is now a tainted term. If you're not up on text analysis it's a hard topic to discuss, and if you are up on text analysis there's little reason to discuss it anyway. I don't do much SEO these days, for various reasons, but my very first step is always text analysis. I spent hundreds of hours puzzling out how a few different search engines worked, testing hypotheses as I went, and what I came away with was that, in the main, relatively simple text analysis is very predictive of actual search index ranking once you know the optimal ranges for key parameters. Not perfectly predictive, of course, because the major search engines have more data that I can't acquire for myself, but it turned out that, for example, Googod's PageRank made only minor differences. It was more of a tie breaker than a primary factor except in those cases where previous misguided SEO efforts like stuffing link farms resulted in punitive sinking. (I say "was" because we can't get at the PageRank numbers any more, and I suspect that the Googod has so completely reworked their algorithms that there isn't a single number functionally equivalent to PageRank any more. There's no reason to derive such a number if you're not using it.)

After keyword massage, the next most important thing, and usually far more expensive, is real no shit marketing to catalyze the organic growth of external links. This is huge, and not just for the SEO bump. Organic links from related sites and especially watering holes have much, much higher conversion rates. Organic links from product enthusiast community sites (the watering holes) have much higher conversion rates than any others. There's a bit of an advantage, too, to having links from watering holes because in addition to bringing personal recommendations from trusted parties (thus the exceptional conversion rate) the back button usually doesn't lead to a long listing of competitors the way search engine results do. The SEO bump is good, but the best reason to do this kind of marketing is to get members of the target market making noise for you -- customers are good, evangelists are better. Huy Fong Foods doesn't advertise their Sriracha sauce because they don't have to. They have evangelists who promote their product for free.

About product differentiation: One of the reasons it's hard is because consumers don't really like it. They like a very narrow range of acceptable difference within an otherwise homogenous selection. Apple is a great example: When they did all of their own engineering and delivered a product that was in many ways truly, objectively, quantifiably better and quite different from the PC, they sat in the dugout watching Microsoft and Intel score home run after home run. Then, when they started using free software (BSD kernel, GNU utilities, etc.) and commodity hardware as the basis of their products, adding just a (metaphorical) coat of paint to it for branding, they became the #1 brand on the planet. They weren't so very different any more, but they continued marketing themselves as if they were. The iPhone is not at all objectively, quantifiably superior to a flagship Android and is in some ways inferior, but the Apple fans have affinity instilled into them by the projected image of the company. The same image Apple has always strived to project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

But of course the Mac before OS X never managed to reach critical mass. It was too different despite being in many ways technically superior. Now that it's much the same as anything else the advertising that never really worked before works extraordinarily well. People, masses of people, prefer form over function every time -- they want you to bullshit them about how your generic product is superior to all others almost indistinguishable from it. They want acceptable difference, and that mostly means the same old same old but with branding that catalyzes affinity. Now Microsoft is having trouble competing because they're not the only game in town any more, and they don't (yet) know how to deal with that. They're starting to look a lot like Yahoo in that regard, except that Yahoo has never spent a microsecond at the top of the heap. When Alta Vista stopped kicking their ass, Google started.

If you're not familiar with Edward Bernays, you might want to read a little about the guy. He elevated the art of bullshit to what were then remarkable levels but are now the norm, and completely destroyed the concept of the free market in the process -- but almost no one noticed that he'd done that last part. Free market ideology crumbles if it's not true that the market is populated by consumers who make well informed, rational decisions in their own best interests, and Bernays proved that notion patently false. People don't give a damn about becoming well informed, and happily accept whatever the mass media tell them. Watch a lot of televised news for a week with the thought in mind that most of it originated in PR departments, if you've never done it before, and you'll begin to intuit how PR works when it's conducted by masters. Even the hard news, when it intersects with the bigger message, is presented in such a way that it supports that bigger message. "Today in [some faraway place] a suicide bomber associated with [some identified enemy] killed...". They will never say that the suicide bomber was a grieving mother retaliating in the only way available to her against those who murdered her babies with a drone strike that destroyed her house, because that would take the act out of the realm of unfathomable evil and make it understandable to us, and enable us to sympathize. Betcher ass I'd go after anyone who bombed my house while I was away and murdered my family, we'd say, and that would undermine popular support for war. It's much the same when the media reports on just about everything. There's a bigger message that the story must support, and frequently it's a corporate PR firm delivering it. As an old buddy of mine used to say, the best time to advertise on television is between the commercial breaks.

If consumers were rational agents who act in their own best interests, they wouldn't be, as they are, quite content to question nothing that accords with their preconceived perspectives, perspectives which for the most part were spoon fed to them and accepted without question. That kind of mental laziness is wholly irrational and counter to the consumers' best interests.

Marketing isn't about telling people about products -- that era ended a century ago. It's about associating positive feelings with products. If you can catalyze feelings of affinity for your product, you can sell the shit out of it -- and it doesn't matter if the product is any different from those competing with it. Every now and then the right feeling to associate with the product actually happens to be a quantifiable quality of the product, like when a tool manufacturer offers lifetime no questions asked replacement, but what the consumer pays for is the feeling he gets when he thinks "I use only the best and that reflects well upon me". It doesn't matter if it's true that it's the best -- the feeling, the affinity, is what the consumer pays for.

One of my former clients who's apparently out of business now was once spectacularly successful, in part because they offered a 30 day lowest price guarantee. It was the usual thing: Find the same product at a lower price on any retail web site or national chain retailer within 30 days of purchase and we'll refund to you the difference plus five percent. Customers quite wrongly assumed that a vendor who'd offer such a guarantee must be pretty damned confident that they offer the lowest prices available, though it wasn't at all hard to find lower prices on sites linked from the same search engine results page -- but lower on the page because I'd done my job well and everyone was lower on the page. Of several million dollars in annual sales, my client never processed more than ten guarantee claims per year in the decade I was involved with them. The cost to make that noise was just a few bucks, the time it took me to sprinkle a graphic around and link the images to the guarantee terms page I wrote. It didn't matter at all that they didn't offer the absolute lowest price. What mattered was that they made their customers feel that they were savvy consumers even though it was the furthest thing from the truth. It's not at all savvy to just believe whatever bullshit someone throws in your face in the course of selling you something.

Making noise is cheap. It can be expensive if you have to buy the time in which it's made, but you don't have to do that if you can figure out a better way. I don't promote my business at all but I've got evangelists, so I also have geographical clusters of clients scattered around the country. I'm one of those few cantankerous fucks who just will not work with an asshole because I don't want to and don't have to, and between that, my relatively high but not outrageous rates, and the glowing referrals of my clients, I appear exclusive and justifiably so. The result is that potential new clients who contact me are already sold. I'm the first one they talk to, and the last unless I reject them -- which I do, from time to time, when I get the feeling that I'm talking to one who's going to turn asshole on me or who can't afford their grand dreams. I have to earn my reputation over and over with everything I do, just like everyone else, but the purchase decisions are already made before the first contact. Ya just can't buy that, and strenuous promotion would take it away from me. I like it that way. I like being rewarded for avoiding hard work.

That's why I say that product differentiation is hard but making noise is easy. It's especially easy if you can get others to make the noises you want made.

 

thanks man, i appreciate you taking your time to help, great insights there.