Guest Post: Using Microdata and the Benefits for SEO

Often a bit overlooked by many developers and SEOs alike is microdata. This is a development in the past few years that helps to mark up HTML, and certain text, or objects, to make them easily identifiable. Many SEO’s may have noticed the trend of the review-rich snippets about a year ago, having a display in the Google search results that gave you a star rating. There is much more to microdata than just doing a review markup anymore, though. It has really evolved into it’s own language. As an SEO, I’m going to show you a few practical uses and implementations of microdata and how to make sure you’re doing it correctly.

Schema.org Overview

Before diving headlong into microdata, let’s quickly breakdown what it is. Schema  is the most common language for microdata anymore, it can be a way for Google to easily identify events, organizations, people, businesses, products and their details, and reviews to name a few. They even get as specific as food recipes, music, or movie identification. If you have a business, event, place, product, or thing, you can likely mark it up with Schema. This is a language that Google can easily crawl and identify. In some cases, they even use it for rich snippets in a search result. For those who don’t know, rich snippets are an addition to a normal search result. For example, this result has a recipe rich snippet, which displays information to help better identify what the page is about for the user.

For more information about Schema and the more specific markups, you can use check out their website under Organization of Schemas.

Microdata for a Local Business

The most common and simplest Schema mark up is for a local business. This can often help your local SEO rankings. For Google, it helps identify that address being associated with the business name. The code is done like so:

<div itemscope<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemtype=”http://schema.org/LocalBusiness”> <strong><span<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemprop=”name”>[The Business Name]</span></strong><br /><br /><br /><br /> <div itemprop=”address” itemscope<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”> <span<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemprop=”streetAddress”>[Business Street Address]</span><br /><br /><br /><br /> <span itemprop=”addressLocality”>[Business City]</span>,<br /><br /><br /><br /> <span itemprop=”addressRegion”>[Business State]</span><br /><br /><br /><br /> <span itemprop=”postalCode”>[zip code]</span><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> </div> <span itemprop=”telephone”>[Business Phone<br /><br /><br /><br /> Number]</span> </div>

Copy and paste this where you want your address, and then fill in the fields of your business name, address, and phone number. You should use this code as a way to list your business’s NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) as a structured citation. This will help your local SEO just be consistent with your Google Places’ NAP.

**Remember this is HTML, and must be embedded in HTML mode. Otherwise, it will not be displayed properly. If you are using WordPress, be aware that going from your HTML editor to your visual editor will erase the code you have inserted.

Microdata for Events

If you are promoting an event, offering a class, hosting a dinner, or putting on any type of actual event, you will want to use microdata as a mark up. This will help to display your event(s) in your search result and their specific time and date. This can really help to increase your sign ups and the awareness of your event. To make this even easier, Google recently released the Google Webmaster Data Highlighter feature which is an excellent way to have a short cut to using microdata as they will structure the data for you. While crawling your website, it can actually identify your event data and if you use a consistent markup, with time it will automatically structure your data properly. This is an awesome feature, and, unfortunately, is only works for event structuring right now. I eagerly await other markup and ways to just highlight and structure your data.

If the highlighter isn’t working for you, there is a great event schema generator that allows you to input your information, submit it, and it will give you the HTML you need for making your events structured.  Again, if you are using WordPress, make sure that you update your page in the HTML editor.

Microdata for Products

Last, but certainly not least, on useful microdata (or structured markups) is products. For eCommerce websites, this can be hugely effective, and, unfortunately, there is no easy way to implement this. For that reason, many sites are not using these mark ups yet. The real benefit to using product Schema or microdata is that it can display in the search results more information about the product such as reviews and price. If you happen to be an eCommerce site owner, I wish I could give you a simple use this HTML answer. But with how many different platforms that exist, it really differs in the implementation. Instead, what I am going to do is give you the code and what data goes in each field.

<div itemscope<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”> <img itemprop=”image”<br /><br /><br /><br /> src=”[Product Image URL]” /> <span itemprop=”name”>[Product<br /><br /><br /><br /> Name]</span> <div itemprop=”aggregateRating” itemscope<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemtype=”http://schema.org/AggregateRating”> <span<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemprop=”ratingValue”>[what the product is rated]</span> out<br /><br /><br /><br /> of <span itemprop=”bestRating”>[Highest Product<br /><br /><br /><br /> Rating]</span> based on <span itemprop=”ratingCount”>[How<br /><br /><br /><br /> Many Reviews are Done]</span> user ratings </div> <div<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemprop=”offers” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Offer”><br /><br /><br /><br /> <span itemprop=”price”>[Product Price]</span> <link<br /><br /><br /><br /> itemprop=”availability” href=”http://schema.org/InStock” />In stock<br /><br /><br /><br /> </div> <span itemprop=”description”>[Product<br /><br /><br /><br /> Description]</span> </div> This is fairly complex. So, I suggest that you consult a developer to help you implement this.

The benefits of product markup are great, and sometimes so can be the complexity of how to accomplish it. Above is just the example code, please make sure to work this around your product pages to format them and make them well styled as the user experience is most important.

Checking your Microdata

Using microdata can be some confusing business, and you might be wondering is there a way to check it and see if it is correct? The answer is yes, Google has a Structured Data Testing Tool in which you can input a live URL or HTML (if you are still in development) and see the structured data and even how your search result might appear.

If you have multiple pages to check I suggest looking at The Structured Data Testing Tool Bookmarklet by AJ Kohn. You can use the bookmark to easily check the URL you are on in the Google Structured Data testing Tool.

Speaking the Language of Google

These are just a few of the many markups that can be used from Schema.org. This is a language, and a very new code that Google is using to help searchers find what they are looking for, and for Googlebots to better identify the relevance in a structured form. The structured data will make your website, and important information, easier for Google to understand and read. This is something that is not soon to go away, and using it now will get you ahead of the curve.

This is a post by Frank Scharnell(@fscharnell) at Ethical SEO Consulting.