There are a lot of SEO’s that think having a technical background makes you a better all-around SEO, and I’m one of them. With that said, Google took a step forward today in making one small fragment of technical SEO a little bit easier for the non-developer types.
Google’s Data Highlighter was rolled out today as a simplified way to make event-driven pages on your website easier for Google to understand. Meetup.com is a good example of a site that was already giving Google additional event based structured data so that it’s results could look like this:
Google’s new step-by-step tool walks a site owner through the markup on their event page so that you can show Google exactly what information you’d like to share. They were nice enough to make a video for you to get the idea behind it.
So now you can have a site that appears like you are a techno genius without all the trouble of actually having to be one!
You can find the tool in your Google Webmaster Tools under the Optimization section.
You can find written support of its features with the Google webmaster’s forum under Data Highlighter.
The experiments over the next few weeks should be fun to watch, but now Google has given searchers one more reason to not bother to click-through to your site.
