ROR
(Resources of a Resource)
BETA
Main
[You may reprint this article on your website, blog, newsletter,
or magazine as long as you don't modify its content or author information.]
Help Search Engines get Smarter, ROR
your Website!
What is ROR?
ROR (Resources of a Resource) is an exciting new
website content description tool and format. It makes it very easy
to describe the content, objects, and structure of your website so
search engines and other web applications can better find and understand
your information.
For example if you are selling products, ROR enables you to document
your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability,
affiliate programs, etc. Or if your site or blog provides information
on a given topic, it allows you to describe how this information
is organized (sitemap, topics, categories, new information, archive,
blogroll, etc). ROR also provides terms for documenting objects
such as contacts, articles, newsletter, feeds, images, audio,
links, reviews, privacy policy, copyrights, and more.
ROR information can be easily added to your website by adding a ROR
File called ror.xml.
To create the file ROR provides templates and examples. It also provide
a ROR File Editor, which will
extract information from your website and allow you to describe it
further. Larger websites can also generate ROR files from their databases.
Why Describe?
But why is it important to describe your website? Well, consider this
phrase: "We offer a 10% discount on all our
products until Mother's Day". While these words mean a
lot to your visitors, they unfortunately won't mean much to a search
engine or shopping search engine. Language is extremely complex and
it will take time even for Google to elevate search to such levels
of sophistication. And that's just one language, English.
So for now, to communicate your product information to shopping search
engines you typically need to provide a feed (a machine-readable description
of your products), and re-submit that feed to each engine each time
the information changes. And to make matters worse, none of these
feeds have the same format, so you also have to learn each format.
Another Approach
ROR suggests a better approach. Since search engines already come
to your site to read text information about your products, it makes
sense to also read additional information like prices, image URLs,
discounts, etc. This way, you only change the information once, in
your ROR file, and that's it. Product information is just one example
but it illustrates this issue rather well.
ROR information can also be displayed on your website in a generic
fashion so visitors can quickly and easily find information, without
the need to re-learn or remember the structure and navigation of each
website they visit. For that purpose, ROR provides an Info
Button. The button reads the information directly from
your ROR file.
ROR simply makes a lot of sense! It's powerful, easy, and very flexible.
ROR your Website, Spread the Word
You can get your ROR file at http://www.rorweb.com,
it only takes a few minutes for a basic file. You can always add more
information later. You can also help spread the word by adding this
article on your website, or a link to it.
Happy RORing!
The ROR Team
http://www.rorweb.com
[You may reprint this article on your website, blog, newsletter,
or magazine as long as you don't modify its content or author information.]
|