Google's Structured Data Markup Helper Tool

The near-term future of SEO is Rich Snippets, Schema Tags, Strukturierte Daten or Structured Data. However you choose to call it, the topic, structured data, is the very definition of search engine optimization and its not a superficial task that can be remedied in a day or two. Who says SEO is dead (again)?

I’ve always said there will always be work for SEOs because the business of “Search” will never stop evolving and search will always be important on the (real) Internet (not walled-gardens like Facebook, al la AOL). This is proof positive of that.

This topic is especially poignant at a time when there seems to be nothing to do for SEOs but wait for the next version of Panda and try to extrapolate between Matt Cutts utterances and what one sees in SERP results. SEOs SEO bloggers of late seem to spend more time typing posts about Panda than doing any SEO work. This moment in SEO-time seems more like the financial industry waiting for the next meaningless FED announcement. Lots of noise, signifying very little. I actually believe this proves that if you spend all your time blogging about something, its hard to see the forest for the trees.

Getting started with structured data

Thursday, May 30, 2013 at 7:00 AM

Could it be clearer what the future of search is (for Google)? But it seems not too many SEOs are listening. Yes the majors picked up on the topic (a bit)  (WebmasterWorld, SearchEngineLand, SEOroundtableTechcrunch, Lifehacker) but mostly echoed the PR. I don’t find the type of ah-ha! moment anywhere that I think this should signal. Perhaps its because this is not really a brand-new topic from Google. Google has released a prior PR about the tool that may have softened the impact. This is different.

Here is why I see it differently; 1) THIS press release with THIS tool tells you SPECIFICALLY which tags Google supports (thanks to SearchEngineLand for the only real analysis on this latest release), 2) Google’s making a 2nd attempt to get our attention! and 3) I work primarily with businesses that sell products. Together, this is the SEO my clients need to gain competitive advantage while their competition is working (spending) feverishly on nonsense (read non-productive) like social media.