Today’s search engines have gotten very good at parsing Web content to deliver relevant content to their users. Google is renowned for constantly striving to improve its algorithms so that its Web crawlers see content as a human would see it. And yet, a wide gap remains between what the machine can read and what a human easily grasps when viewing a Web page.

In part two of our Future of Hospitality Websites series, I will focus on best practice advice that Alix Paye, our vice president of creative and Web strategy, and her team offer our hotel customers to help them ensure that their Websites can be found by the search engines.  Considering that most travelers will consult a search engine before booking any travel, it continues to be critical that we get this right.

If you look at the evolution of web technologies since 1991, HTML was largely focused on how to format and display a page in a web browser. JavaScript added improved user interaction with the website, and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) brought improved structure and platform independence to how text is formatted. CSS also brought some help to search engines in ascertaining the relative importance the author/designer placed on various headlines and subheads that appear on a page.

Yet this advance still failed to provide very much information about the meaning of a Webpage. Then, in 2003, Microformats were introduced to help bloggers use existing tools, such as XHTML, to add richer data to their Websites. This was followed in 2004 by RDFa (Resource Description Framework – attributes) that adds a set of extensions to XHTML for embedding rich metadata within Web documents. Using RDFa, it is possible to turn human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content. This was the beginning of the Semantic Website, which will grow even stronger as HTML5, introduced in 2010, is fully implemented to integrate human and machine usability into one set of standards.

With a non-semantic Website, the search engines see only Headlines and Text.  For example, the above Website on the left is what we see; we know it is a hotel with products and services, an address, telephone number, etc.  On the right the search engine sees only a headline, text and some links and cannot place meaning to this website.

The semantic website defines schemas and actually gives meaning to the content.   By integrating code you can tell the search engines things like “this is a business” with an “address.”   Here is a sample of what search engines see when they crawl a properly structured Semantic Website.  This example is taken from the Website of the Hay Adams Hotel in Washington, DC.

This produces enriched results where the search engine actually understands the nature of the Website.  The search engines use the semantic mark up to add more information into the search results which entices the visitor to click through to your site.  See the example below of search engine results for a semantic Website.

Compare this with the search results for your business and determine whether your Website is providing enriched results.