Microdata, Your Website, and Search Engine Optimization

Search engine companies Google, Bing, and Yahoo compete heavily for market share, so when they gang together in order to work on search engine optimization tools it is the wise web master who takes notice. ?Their newest collaborative effort is Microdata, a tool designed to increase the accuracy and efficiency of search engine results pages.

What is Microdata?

Microdata is a way of tagging your HTML5 content to help search engines figure out what the content is and, therefore, how relevant it is to a search request. ?The new tags are called ?schema?. ?Each schema has its own set of properties, some of which may be shared by other schemas and some of which are completely unique. Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo have worked together to create thousands of these schemas for all kinds of items both tangible and intangible.

How do I use it?

• Use schema tags only on the visible content on your webpage.
• Use itemscope to specify that everything following is part of the schema?(example: <div itemscope)
• Add the itemtype element after itemscope in order to tell the search engine the what type of information is being discussed (example: <div itemscope itemtype=?http://schema.org/Book?>
• Itemtypes must always be expressed as url?s (example: http://schema.org/Itemtype)
• Tag supporting details with itemprop (example: itemprop=?name? or itemprop=?publisher?)

Why put in all the effort to add it?

If you don?t add the schema tags, you?re leaving it up to the search engine bots to try and figure out what your content means, where to place it, and how to rank it. ?Naturally, this leaves a whole lot of room for error. ?If you want to be sure that the content you have worked so hard to create and promote is accurately processed by the search engines, it?s worth the effort to add the schema tags to your posts.

What about WordPress?

Where can I find out more?

The single best source of information on schema tags is http://www.w3.org ? the internet standards experts.

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About Casey (32 Posts)

I have been in Search Engine Optimization since 2009. Helping our clients get more traction online is what I really enjoy doing.

Source: http://www.smbseo.com/microdata-your-website-and-search-engine-optimization

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