By Bob Plunkett…

Last month, the three big search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, decided to cooperate on a single markup language that webmasters and SEOs use to enhance their sites in search listings. That language is called schemas – a collection of codes you can place around content on your site in order to help search engines better find your site and understand what kind of site it is. The better a search engine understands, the higher your site is placed on search results.

Currently, these codes come in several variations including HTML markup, microdata, microformat, and sometimes Google Search Snippets. So far they have proven to be inconsistent – some work well on one search engine but not all. Until now. The new language, or set of codes, is called schema.org and will not only work uniformly on all search engines, it will describe the site and content accurately. Right now, for example, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag, but don’t give any information about what that text string means – the word ”bass” could refer to a fish, musical instrument or a certain shoe. This makes it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content. Schema.org will provide a shared vocabulary that provides more information and can be understood by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

Basically, it’s a case of Google, which has been using schemas called Search Snippets or microdata for better search results, sharing that coding with Bing and Yahoo!. It makes for more consistent results from the three search engines.

The new coding will require more work building sites but it also means search engines will more easily find your site and accurately describe it. It will also enhance your search results, which leads to more click-throughs on your listings.

There are some detractors. Some web specialists wonder if it’s a good idea for search engines to tell webmasters how to describe and code their sites. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? And how easily could schema.org be abused? That translates into some added work and expense as content management systems move to adapt.

Some site administrators will no doubt have nightmares, but in the end it should lead to greater search exposure.