Anyone that has published a website knows how frustrating it can be optimize your sight for Search Engine relevance. This feat has been particularly tough, because until today many of the largest Search Engines and Indexes has used different criteria to rank pages.

At last, the major players - Google, Yahoo, and Bing - have announced a major move in the right direction. Today, the three companies collectively announced that they will be partnering to create schema.org, a resource for site owners to gain insight into how to improve their sites’ search results. The site will provide a standardized collection of schemas, or HTML tags, webmasters can add to their pages to make it easy for search providers to recognize and display their sites.

For more info, here is Schema’s description of the tool: “Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.”