Structured data markup for html has been around for a while, but it can be confusing and isn’t always seen as a priority to implement.
Its usage by the big search engines and other organisations is only going to increase though, so it’s well worth getting your head around it and start marking up as much content as you can to take advantage of the current and potential future benefits.
It seems clear to me that this kind of markup will play an increasingly bigger part in seo as well as allowing the data to be used in other ways, such as a wider variety of rich snippets on the search results pages.
From the schema.org FAQs: “over time you can expect that more data will be used in more ways. In addition, since the markup is publicly accessible from your web pages, other organizations may find interesting new ways to make use of it as well.”
Presentation
Last week I gave a presentation at work to try and spread the word, and at the same time discovered just what a large and interesting topic this is.
I intend to write more on this topic but in the meantime here are my slides. The topics that I cover are:
- why adding structured data markup is a good idea
- specific benefits gained
- the different types of markup – RDFa, microformats, microdata, schema.org
- some general implementation guidelines
- helpful tools
- links to some bit.ly bundles <– some of these are really interesting, I urge you to check them out
