Will Structured Markup Data be the new META data?

In June 2011, the big 3 Search Engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo! announced the introduction of a shared collection of schemas that webmasters can use to maximize the results of their markup efforts. Search engines use markup to help understand the content of web pages, resulting in richer search results for their customers. The outcome – users can more easily find relevant information on the web.

What is Structured Markup data?

Structured Markup data (also called rich snippets and microdata) is, in the simplest terms, a method of providing additional information about your web pages’ content to search engines. It is a way to give the search engines details about your website that they are unable to interpret via algorithms. For example, you can define information about a product you sell online such as the manufacturer, the brand, the make, the Product ID, name, description, price, and more.

Your web page will likely already contain this detail in a way that a human user can read and interpret. The goal of Structured Markup is to provide this same information in a way that search engines can understand. Essentially, structured markup is a process for identifying important data consistently across your site, in a way that is uniform across the internet.

Structured markup data is like enhanced search results. Standard Search results will show the page title and the plain text description from the web page. Search results enhanced through microdata can also display images, reviews, product details, prices, and lots of other information directly in the results. This gives internet search users more detailed information, making searches more efficient. In the below example, the first recipe is a plain search result. The second is enhanced with a picture, review information, cook time, and calories, all defined by microdata.

What’s new?

Structured Markup data is certainly not a new concept. For years search engines have offered structured markup data for webmasters and site owners. Up until now, each search engine has had its own format and schema. The announcement of a shared schema from Google, Bing, and Yahoo means that with one set of definitions, you can provide data to all 3 of the major search engines.

The HTML5 draft specification includes Microdata. While HTML5 is not expected to become the standard for a few more years, most browsers have already begun incorporating some of the features, including microdata. Conveniently, if a browser doesn’t support microdata, the browser will simply ignore it.

What does microdata mean to my business?

A good SEO strategy always keeps you ahead of your competitors. While it may be another year, or 3-4 years before microdata is widely implemented, you certainly don’t want to be the last one on board. Want to get ahead of your competitors? Contact Cool Blue today to find out how you can become among the first to integrate the new schema collection.