Have you heard of microdata? It's really just a way to label content to describe the specific type of information contained - like product reviews, description, brand, event, etc. For example, an event has the following properties: venue, starting time, name, and category.

Microdata uses simple attributes in HTML tags to assign brief and descriptive names to items and properties. Google developed this standard with their competitors, Bing and Yahoo, in an effort to create a standard, rather than proprietary structures. The standard is maintained at Schema.org.



This is important because it will allow the search engines to better classify information. Here's a quick example: Today, if a person searches for the keyword "Tacoma vehicle", they'll get results for both trucks by Toyota and a city in Washington. Microdata would enable search engines to only provide those results for Tacoma Trucks, increasing relevancy.

This is also an indicator that your company is paying attention. A website containing microdata is likely to be viewed by Google as more sophisticated, and possibly more believable than competitive sites without it. That means that when Google attempts to provide the most relevant search results, you're in a better position to ascend to the top of the list!

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