This is the archive of the goodrelations dicussion list

Dear all:

I just posted a longer answer on how to use GoodRelations for SEO on Quora and thought it may also be interesting for people on this list:

Best

Martin Hepp

Q: How can RDFa and microformats be used for SEO?

A:
The important thing is that RDFa (and, to a lesser degree, microformats), allow you as a site owner to preserve the precision and structure of your product / item / service information when communicating it via the WWW. Without RDFa, what you send is just unstructured text, even though you use a precise collection of data in your shop system for creating the item pages. This makes it hard for the search engine to extract, interpret, and properly rank your individual pages.

With RDFa, you can "piggy-back" a smal yet rich piece of structured data (like an invisible, small datasheet for your product), which search engines AND novel browser extensions AND new mobile applications can use to inform potential customers much more precisely.

The most important standard for RDFa-based SEO is GoodRelations (http://purl.org/goodrelations/), a vocabulary for exposing price, product, store, payment, and delivery information.

Watch this 15 min webcast for more information:

    http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/a-short-introduction-to-semantic-webbased-ecommerce-the-goodrelations-vocabulary-presentation 

Adding GoodRelations in RDFa to your site is actually pretty easy, see

    http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelationsQuickstart

For optimal Google results, use this modification:

    http:///www.heppresearch.com/gr4google
 
GoodRelations is supported by Google and Yahoo, who will render your page much better if you have GoodRelations data inside, and is being used by companies like BestBuy, Overstock.com, CSNStores, and thousands of smaller shops.

For adding GoodRelations to a shop, you can either

- use a recipe from the GoodRelations Cookbook,

    http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#CookBook:_GoodRelations_Recipes_and_Examples

- use one of the existing free extensions for shop software like Magento, Wordpress WP4EC, Joomla/Virtuemart, and others; see list at

    http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations#Shop_Software

- use the GoodRelations snippet generator (mostly for a small shop with static HTML and few items):

   http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/tools/grsnippetgen/
or 

- develop your own RDFa pattern

Tips for RDFa authoring are here

    http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/RDFaAuthoring

If you want to describe tickets for events, airfare or other transportation, also check out  the respective GoodRelations extension

    http://purl.org/tio/ns

For car sales and rental, bikes, boats, etc., check out

    http://purl.org/vso/ns

If you are selling a few but very specific items, you should combine GoodRelations with http://www.productontology.org, e.g.

   http://www.productontology.org/doc/Soldering_iron

If you have any other questions, please contact me by e-mail at mheppATcomputerDOTorg

Best wishes

Martin Hepp