Why use microdata?

Your web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read the web pages. But search engines have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages. By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, “Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video”—you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way. Microdata is a set of tags, introduced with HTML5, that allows you to do this.

schema.org provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages.

On Bas22 we decided to use JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation – Linked Data) instead of HTML markup. JSON is “JSON-based format to serialize Linked Data,” meaning it relies on JSON to provide that same schema.org information to data consumers. So while RDFa and microdata require HTML, JSON-LD can be provided as islands embedded in HTML, or used directly with data-based web services and in application environments.

Example

Sadly, JSON-LP right now is not supported by the official Structured Data Testing Tool of Google and as we expected, the microdata is not displayed in Google´s Search results page, the same behavior happens in Bing and Yahoo.

You can test it on using the next link:

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fbase22.com%2Fwps%2Fportal%2Fhome

To see html tags in action, we decided to use that approach in one of our pages: work here 

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fbase22.com%2Fwps%2Fportal%2Fhome%2Fabout-us%2Fwork-here

Finally, despite that JSON-LP right now is not officially supported by Google, Bing or Yahoo, we believe and trust on this new technology, as example, I invite you to visit and read about Carbon LDP.

References:

• http://schema.org/
• http://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld-syntax/#embedding-json-ld-in-html-documents
• http://www.seoskeptic.com/json-ld-google-knowledge-graph-schema-org-seo/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_%28HTML%29

Hope you find this information useful!!