Common Tag: New Meta Data Tag for the Semantic Web
Common Tag, a new meta data tag that supposedly adds even more semantic web value to your pages, was launched on June 11. A community pet, adopted and developed by many web companies (including AdaptiveBlue, Zemanta, Freebase, Yahoo! and Zigtag,) Common Tag allows site owners and administrators to further structure content with HTML, creating the tags we use to make our blog entries, online videos and crazy pictures from Memorial Day more identifiable to our friends, family and the searching public.
This complicated new code does allow for more information, which we always want to provide as an SEO, but the data will largely go unrecognized by search engines crawling the web. While RDFa vocabulary, which Common Tag is based on, is used by Google and other search engines for enhanced listings and such, but neither Google nor Yahoo have implemented the use of meta data in web search.
Common Tag, however, will provide opportunity for online databases that are packed with information, hence the companies involved. With a large collection of data, Common Tag will help organize. The new tag will be based on concepts, each of which has its own set of meta data, serving to relate the concept to the RDFa vocabulary terms. This will reduce the number of tags by including all variations of a tag in the single concept, thus eliminating the need for keyword stemming in tags.
So what makes Common Tag different from keyword meta data? It’s fancy. You can use Common Tag to attach concepts to specific segments of your content, right down to a single paragraph. It can also be used for external content, such as links or embedded media, giving every segment of your page a meaning for the semantic web.
What will be most daunting is building a sufficient database. Right now, in order to use Common Tag, you have to choose the concepts you would like to use from data at a participating database, such as Freebase. You can also use this data in an application such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey.
All in all, this new tag may be useful for databases, and could, in the future with semantic web, create opportunity for Search Engine Optimization (and a ton of extra work.) If you’d like to learn more about the new kid on the meta data block, read the Common Tag Press Release.
Related articles:
- Google and Future of the Semantic Web (mehmetalierturk.com)
- Google Takes Steps Towards A More Structured Web (techcrunch.com)
- Yahoo! Announces Common Tag: Like the Meta Keywords Tag, But Even Better (searchengineland.com)
Tags: code, common tag, databases, freebase, google, html, html code, meta data, meta keywords, metadata, RDFa, search, search engine optimization, Semantic Web, site design, tagging, tags, Yahoo, Zemanta
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Blog, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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