You might have seen some blips on your radar lately about using Microdata HTML5, but what does it mean for your website and why should you consider it? Microdata is a way of labeling your website content via your HTML code that will help make your content easier to understand for both the Search Engines, and other machines, that may access your website information.  When you help the Search Engines understand the meaning of your content, you make it easier for them to provide a richer and more detailed search engine results listings for your website. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!

Let’s look at an example.  Take a look at the Google Search Engine result below. Do you notice the nice colorful stars on the review and the cooking time displayed? If you’re guessing that this additional info is likely being added as a result of Microdata then, my friend, you would be correct!

Using Microdata will not help you rank higher at this time (see Google), but it will make your listing on the Search Engine results stand out. It may also help encourage you to add additional data that Search Engine users will want and thus, in effect, attract more traffic.

That’s all fine and dandy, but is this going to be a pain to set up? Well, probably not in most cases. Your pages will need to be HTML5 pages (yes, you can use some HTML5 now, even back to IE6) and it will depend on how you’ve built the information into your pages. Here’s an example of some Microdata code that was added to text to make movie review data show up in the Google results (see full example). Not too bad really if you’re comfortable with getting into the code.

More important points to consider:

• The Microdata formatting was set up via as a collaborative effort by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft (see schema.org). So, thankfully, Microdata will work for all the major Search Engines.
• Google supports Microdata for people, events, reviews, products, recipes, breadcrumb navigation and many others.
• Google has already set up a variety of specific search sites for items such as recipes. In the future utilizing Microdata may lead to better performance on focused search sites such as this one.
• Microdata is one form of Rich Snippets that Google supports (there is also MicroFormats and RDFa). The format established by the schema.org collective is exclusively the Microdata format. Microdata is currently Google’s focal format for these data-enhanced results.

Developing page structure / semantics are some things you’ll be hearing more of as HTML5 gains traction. The Microdata part of this is a great tool to consider using right now or to plan for in the future!

For More Info:

Introducing Schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web

Getting started with schema.org

Schema.org FAQ