Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR your Website!
You may have noticed some
changes to the AddMe website this week. Coninciding with the Search
Engine Strategies Conference in New York, we introduced a new
service called ROR.
ROR (Resources of
a Resource) is an exciting new website content description
tool and format. It makes it very easy to describe the content,
objects, and structure of your website so search engines and other
web applications can better find and understand your information.
For example if you are
selling products, ROR enables you to document your product names,
descriptions, prices, images, availability, affiliate programs,
etc. Or if your site or blog provides information on a given topic,
it allows you to describe how this information is organized (sitemap,
topics, categories, new information, archive, blogroll, etc).
ROR also provides terms for documenting objects such as contacts,
articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio, links, reviews, privacy
policy, copyrights, and more.
ROR information can be
easily added to your website by adding a ROR File called
ror.xml. To create the file we provide templates and examples.
We also provide a ROR File Editor, which will extract information
from your website and allow you to describe it further. Larger
websites can also generate ROR files from their databases.
But why is it important
to describe your website? Well, consider this phrase: "We offer
a 10% discount on all our products until Mother's Day". While
these words mean a lot to your visitors, they unfortunately don't
mean much to a search engine or shopping search engine. Language
is extremely complex and it will take time even for Google to
elevate search to such levels of sophistication. And that's just
one language, English.
So for now, to communicate
your product information to shopping search engines you typically
need to provide a feed (a machine-readable description of your
products), and re-submit that feed to each engine each time the
information changes. And to make matters worse, none of these
feeds have the same format, so you also have to learn each format.
ROR suggests a better
approach. Since search engines already come to your site to read
text information about your products, it makes sense to also read
additional information like prices, image URLs, discounts, etc.
This way, you only change the information once, in your ROR file,
and that's it. Product information is just one example but it
illustrates this issue rather well.
ROR information can also
be displayed on your website in a generic fashion so visitors
can quickly and easily find information, without the need to re-learn
or remember the structure and navigation of each website they
visit. For that purpose, ROR provides an Info Button. The
button reads the information directly from your ROR file.
ROR simply makes a lot
of sense! It's powerful, easy, and very flexible. Not surprisingly,
many of the search engines we contacted so far have already shown
interest in reading ROR files.
Get your ROR file or button
at www.addme.com/ror-sitemap-generator.htm,
it only takes a few minutes for a basic file. You can always add
more information later.
"Help search engines
get smarter, ROR your website!".
Help spread the word by
adding this article
on your site, or a link to it:
Happy RORing,
The Add Me Team
http://www.addme.com
