“If your page lists multiple events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will ‘learn’ that format as you apply tags, and help speed your work by automatically suggesting additional tags,” explains product manager Justin Boyan. “Likewise, if you have many pages of events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will walk you through a process of tagging a few example pages so it can learn about their format variations. Usually, 5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.”

“When you’re done, you can review a sample of all the event data that Data Highlighter now understands,” he adds. “If it’s correct, click ‘Publish.’”

After you do all of this, Google will recognize your latest event listings and make them eligible for enhanced search results anytime it crawls your site.

The tool can be found under “Optimization” in Webmaster Tools. For now, it’s only available in English, but more languages, as well as data types, will be added soon.

Google’s Matt Cutts posted a new Webmaster Help video talking about this, responding to a user-submitted question:

I know rich snippets can increase CTR for my mention on a SERP. But is the use of schema.org code beneficial for my actual positions on the SERPs as well?

“On one hand, I wouldn’t necessarily count on that….Just because you implement schema.org doesn’t mean you necessarily rank higher. But there are some corner cases like if you were to type in ‘lasagna,’ and then click over on the left-hand side and click on ‘recipes,’ that’s the sort of thing where using schema.org markup might help, because then you’re more likely to be showing up in that at all. So there are some cases where it can be helpful to use schema.org markup.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily count on that giving you any sort of ranking boost…I’m not going to take it off the table, but for example, it might make sense in some of those specific topic areas, but just because somebody implements schema.org markup, that doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily and automatically a better site, so I wouldn’t count on that giving you a good ranking boost, although it can be a good idea to markup things in a rich structure just because, you know, then different people can slice and dice and find your site more easily if they are doing more digging.”

Let’s put it this way: it seems unlikely that it will hurt your rankings.

The markup is rel=”next” and rel=”prev”.

Google says users usually prefer the single page format, and as a consumer of content, you probably agree in most cases. But tt’s worth noting that the markup isn’t an absolute must. Even Google acknowledges that there are times when paginated content makes sense. Sometimes single-page versions can load slowly, for example.

Google Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye says, “Remember that if you have paginated content, it’s fine to leave it as-is and not add rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup at all.”

She created a video going more in depth on using the markup.

She has actually put together a 37-page slideshow on the subject as well:

Keep in mind, if you’re in e-commerce, this all applies to you too. It’s not just about writing articles and creating slidehsows. It could very well include product categories that span multiple pages.

Google does say that using the markup provides “a strong hint” that pages should be treated as a “logical sequence”.

By the way, notice that in the video, we have another Googler using a Mac.

Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. Example: English webpages for Australia, Canada and USA, differing only in price

Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. Example: a product webpage in German, English and French

The support is an expansion of the rel=”alternate” hreflang link element. Google says it has expanded it to handle content that is translated or provided for multiple geogrhapic regions.

“The hreflang attribute can specify the language, optionally the country, and URLs of equivalent content,” the company explains on the Webmaster Central blog. “By specifying these alternate URLs, our goal is to be able to consolidate signals for these pages, and to serve the appropriate URL to users in search. Alternative URLs can be on the same site or on another domain.”

You can always use re=”canonical” for pages that have the same content in the same language that are aimed at different countries.

“We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate,” the company says. “For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”

Google looks at some examples of when to use the new markup here. They also have a help center article about the markup here.

The feature is already being utilized by MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation. Search results would look something like this:

“As with other rich snippet formats, implementing the markup does not guarantee that your site will be displayed with the UI shown above on a given search; a variety of factors affect whether a particular rich snippet type will appear in our search results. However, having correct markup is a prerequisite for music rich snippets to ever be displayed,” says Associate Product Manager Gideon Wald.

Schema.org offers a set of guidelines for MusicRecording Markup:

Schema.org was announced by Google, Bing and Yahoo earlier this year as an initiative to support a common set of schemas for structured data markup.

“For now, music rich snippets will display song information when users search for artists, album names or song names,” says Wald. “We’ll continue working both on expanding our existing rich snippets formats and on creating new ones, so keep watching for updates about new types of content that you can surface for users right in your site’s snippets.”

Google offers a rich snippets testing tool here.

A representative for Bing tells WebProNews, “Over the past two years, Bing has worked to improve the search experience to better reflect both the evolving Web and changing consumer habits.”

” While this effort has a major ‘geek factor,’ it serves as quite a significant advancement for both the search industry and consumers,” he said.

The site will provide tips and tools for helping sites appear in search results. “It will also help search engines better understand websites, and moving forward, Bing will work jointly with the larger web community and its search partners to extend the available schema categories,” the representative says. “Consumers will also benefit from this effort by experiencing richer search experiences and content from a much broader set of publishers.”

“At Google, we’ve supported structured markup for a couple years now. We introduced rich snippets in 2009 to better represent search results describing people or containing reviews. We’ve since expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including products, events, recipes, and more,” says Google’s search quality team. “Adoption by the webmaster community has grown rapidly, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than ten times as often as when we started two years ago.”

“We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort to add this markup to your pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way,” the team adds. “That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for Sitemaps in 2006. With schema.org, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.”

The search engines also worked together to support the canonical tag.

Here’s what the schema.org site itself says:

This site provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

A shared markup vocabulary makes easier for webmasters to decide on a markup schema and get the maximum benefit for their efforts. So, in the spirit of sitemaps.org, Bing, Google and Yahoo! have come together to provide a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use.

Google says it has added over 100 new types and ported all existing types of rich snippets. Where in the past it has supported three different standards for structured data markup, they will no only focus on microdata. Google says it will continue to support existing rich snippet markup formats. They also provide a testing tool for markup here.

Bing also says that while it accepts a wide variety of markup formats, it is working to simplify the choices for webmasters.

Jess Lee in the official Google Lat Long blog explains the first feature, multi-user My Maps:

[M]ultiple people can edit the same My Map. Just click the “Collaborate” link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They’ll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it

Google’s Brian Cornell details how to import KML (Keyhole Markup Language) files, which are often used in the context of Google Earth:

[C]reate a new map and click the Import link. You’ll be able to upload a file from your desktop, or enter the URL of a file on the web. We’ll import all of the data from that file into your map for online access and editing.

Brian notes that not all features working in Google Earth (like 3D models) are supported in Google Maps yet. Previously, you were already able to enter a KML address in the Google Maps search box to have it be displayed instantly – but only if it’s not too large.

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I am thoroughly impressed with the hospitality I was shown in Milwaukee. Everyone was very helpful and welcoming. I appreciate that very much. I intend to return to Milwaukee and see more of this great city.

A special thanks to Tiffany, Bill, and Erica for the extra work they did to make sure I was taken care of during my trip.

Regarding the 3 main points I made about constructing quality websites for your clients, here are some links for additional reading.

Code Quality

• W3C Markup Validator — Enter a URL in the first box and click the “Check” button to validate any page on the Web.
• Firefox web developer extension — This is the tool I use to turn stylesheets off and do other geeky website evaluation tricks.
• Adobe on Accessibility — A great primer on accessibility.
• CSS Zen Garden — This is the site that illustrates the power of semantic markup and separating website content from presentation.

Search Engine Optimization

• The Goal of Search Marketing — Sometimes ranking first isn’t necessary to achieve your goals.
• Guide to Link Building for SEO Purposes — Linking is a powerful SEO strategy…this article discusses link building strategies in depth.
• Choosing Keywords Wisely — An overview of the keyword selection process.

Manageability

• 10 Reasons Every Website Needs a CMS — There are more than 10 but this is a good start!
• Sitemaps and SEO — An overview of the Sitemap XML protocol we discussed.

Miscellaneous

• Ten Buzzwords and What They Mean
• All Websites are Not Created Equally

I also had a few requests for information about the services my company offers as well as about Tweak, our content management system so here are links to both of those.

Agency Fusion
Tweak CMS

If you’re interested in learning more about our CMS, I recommend having one of my project managers do a brief online demonstration of the system for you. They’re really good at showing you specifically how you and your clients can benefit from using Tweak.

Please don’t hesitate to post a comment below if you have additional questions or have suggestions on my presentation. I love receiving feedback!

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Can Coding Affect Your Search Ranking

With all the talk about the importance of quality inbound links and avoiding spammy tactics like keyword stuffing, we also deal with myths surrounding coding and text-to-code ratio in terms of search ranking.

Some SEO professions subscribe to the theory that extraneous code throughout the source of a site could hinder the search crawlers from being able to adequately perceive the content of a page, which subsequently leads to less than optimal rankings within the SERP pages.

This article at PhoenixRealm SEO attempts to stress the importance of keeping your backend code clean and pristine:

A cleaner markup means extremely light pages and it also means an increase in content-to-markup ratio. Search engines want more content and less code on your web pages. With less code on your page, your main content moves closer to the top and consequently, gets easily crawled.

Remember that crawlers read only 150-250 words of your page and you should make sure everything important should be covered there. Pages with unnecessary and incorrectly nested code are difficult to crawl. They are also a hindrance to DOM scripting.

However, the handling of messy code is the subject of some debat. Some would say that poor coding can, in effect, disguise the true quality of your content, which you&’ve no doubt gone to great pains in order to develop and perfect. Google, however, is on the record as saying that the text-to-code ratio of a site isn’t really a significant factor in determining that site’s ranking. If the site is crawlable, it is indexable.

In a WebProNews video, Rand Fishkin interviewed Google’s Vanessa Fox and asked her about text to code ratio point blank. Fusednation has a nice synopsis of our video interview with Vanessa Fox of Google where, among other topics, she addresses text-to-code ratio.

From Fusednation:

This point I’ve seen crop up so many times, and each and every time I say – it does not matter! One of my first sites was created in Frontpage with absolutely shocking code and it ranks fine, even for searches with 100 million+ results.

The good word = Google ignores code to text ratio.

Not really big news, but I remember having an argument with a guy on a business forum who was adamant that content / code positioning was a deciding factor.  Ha!  I told you so!

Nice to get clarification on these small things, even if we knew them to be true before. – Scott Boyd (Marketing Guy)

So perhaps a panic induced effort to recode your entire site by hand may be a bit premature, if not altogether unnecessary. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that making your code as clean as it needs to be is an altogether bad thing, but it’s more for your own personal benefit than for that of the search spiders.

When working with keyword themes, alt and title attributes, and developing an intuitive linking structure, you’ll be very well served to keep your code clean enough to easily navigate and edit. Just don’t depend on text-to-code ratios to be the end-all, be-all of your optimization process. 

I’m sorely regretting my decision to sign a new contract with Verizon Wireless last fall because it means I face a stiff cancellation fee if I want an iPhone (currently only available through Apple’s partnership with Cingular).

Other than the relationship with Cingular (see my rant on the Cingular/AT&T confusion), the iPhone seems perfect. Jobs made some pretty big claims about how the iPhone is as revolutionary as the original Macintosh and the iPod. I’m inclined to believe him.

Even if the iPhone doesn’t turn the mobile phone industry upside down, which it seems poised to do, it will do one great thing in my eyes: further the cause of semantic, standards-based web markup. You already know I think standards and semantic markup are important. The iPhone will help make sure even more people think so too.

Here are 3 reasons the iPhone will further the cause of Web standards and semantic markup.

1. The iPhone puts handheld Internet-access in the hands of people other than the usual gadget-heads who’ll put up with a quirky home-grown phone browser. With more of the masses accessing the Web via a handheld device, more clients, designers, and developers are going to be concerned with how a website looks and functions in both traditional and mobile environments.

2. The iPhone has a real browser that developers already target: Safari. The “smartphones” on the market today aren’t full-featured browsers and aren’t even on the radar of most web developers in terms of writing code optimized for these browsers.

3. The iPhone will spawn a whole slew of imitators just like the iPod did. With the bar effectively raised, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, LG, etc. will all have to step up their game and produce a competing product. That means everyone will be making phones capable of a more robust handheld browsing experience, further increasing the desire of web designers and developers (and their clients) to make websites that look good on all devices.

Semantic markup that adheres to established standards is ideal for websites whose audience will be using a variety of devices. The right markup works flawlessly in a desktop browser, a handheld device’s browser, and even in a screen reader.

Apple’s iPhone brings a new device to the market that will gain market share quickly, promote handheld web browsing, and as a result, increase the value of web standards and semantics!

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Brett Derricott is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company with a sweet content management system.

Brett blogs about technology at Agency Byte.