Schema.org is the consortium formed between Google, Yahoo!, Bing to establish markup standards that can enable their search engines to understand the content of your website. The Schema.org vocabulary uses simple HTML tags such as:
<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie">
<h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1>
<div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person">
Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop="birthDate">August 16, 1954)</span>
</div>
<span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a>
</div>
Tags like “itemscope” “itemtype” and “itemprop” help a search engine parse the data displayed so it can be better index and therefore provide more relevant information that could be more accurate.
Photo by: Ian Burt
The downside of this is as search engines become better and better at “understanding” data, they give users answers before the traffic actually makes it to the website. Think about how Google tells you currency conversions or Siri tells you the weather. Some information intensive websites will start to see their traffic dry up as search engines learn how to provide users the information they are looking for without leaving the search engine.
However the SEO benefit makes it inevitable that these changes will become ubiquitous. Working on integrating these microdata formats into your CMS workflow now, can help put you ahead of the curve. And with it being the project of the big search engine players, the sooner you can integrate Schema.org microdata, the better.
