The Internet has evolved organically over time. Its wide open nature is one of its greatest strengths. This also provides challenges to the search engines who are trying to wade through all this unstructured information to make relevant content matches to search queries. SEO professionals, searchers and search engines coped by oversimplify language. The focus was on the literal keywords rather than the intent. Search engines did not know that a search on “Denver SEO” or “SEO in Denver” was really looking for the same information. Often search results were way off target and the system could be easily manipulated in order to drive traffic.

Faster processing speeds and improvements in hardware and software paved the way for a shift away from literal searches to delivering results that the searcher really intended. Now searchers can ask natural questions rather than try to guess what keyword phrase might return some relevant information. The semantic search model was born. This involved cataloging and structuring content to both the searchers intent and context that are now factored into search results.

These advancements lead to many people cataloging and structuring data their own way. Reinventing the wheel every time made it hard for the search engines to see though the clutter and understand the content on a webpage. Google, Yahoo and Bing came together to create a schema and standards for marking up information on a webpage. This standardization effort makes it easier for search engines to return the best information for a search query.

Schema.org was born out of the need to create a central repository to document the schemas that the three major search engines will support. Think of it as a universal translator for your content. Web publishers can use schema markup to tell the search engines specific information about their site, for example, the type of business they are in and where it’s located, product information, nutrition information, information about their blog, ratings, etc.