Microdata is a specification for adding machine-readable code to HTML tags, allowing search engines to categorize content. It labels elements of page content and is compatible with RDFa. Microdata can be extracted for use with JSON and is useful for improving local search results.
Microdata is an HTML-5 specification for adding machine-readable code to a document such as a web page, and the specification should not be confused with companies called microdata systems. All microdata is usually added to HTML tags that display information visible to human users. By adding information to already used tags, a developer can label elements of page content so that search engines and other applications can more easily categorize the content. These labels describe the type of content, such as various aspects of products, organizations, or information about people. The specification does not describe the presentation or appearance of the content.
Document content, such as an organization’s name, address, phone number, and website URL, is labeled using groups, known as elements, of name-value pairs. Within HTML-5 code, the developer will annotate the content as an element, then add element properties such as strings, URLs, dates, and timestamps to that element. The and tags are often the base tags to which the microdata information is added. Just like HTML can be nested, microdata can be nested too. A set of initial vocabularies for element properties is available on the Data Vocabulary organization’s website.
Here is an example of using microdata to describe a product:
Product Name: Banana
Food group: For fruit
Manufacturer: subsidy
Product code: 123456789
The use of microdata is compatible with the Resource Description Framework (RDFa). RDFa works with attribute-level extensions of XHTML. This specification, however, is simpler than the specification for RDFa and is part of the HTML-5 specification. Both RDFa and using microdata are forms of semantic markup.
All microdata can be extracted for use with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is a lightweight data exchange format that humans can read. JSON can be used with asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) programming methods. These methods allow you to retrieve web application data from a server without affecting the behavior and appearance of the web page. Web 2.0 applications often make use of AJAX, so microdata systems can be useful for these programs.
Search engines crawl pages for content structured with microdata so that its rich snippets can present better information on the search results page. It is especially useful for improving local search results, which are special search engines that look at business listing data from a specific region. The company has information on how to add this code to HTML documents in its webmaster tools section.
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