Schema.org, Microdata Markup Standards for Webmasters

Schema.org offers a shared collection of schemas (or html tags) that webmasters can use to markup web pages.

Websites’ pages are often generated dynamically into HTML from structured data that are directly extracted from databases.
With Schema.org’s markup standards, Google, Yahoo and Bing can understand the information on web pages through the original structured data and provide rich snippets within organic search results.

Microdata

Schema.org uses Microdata.

We’ve supported three different standards for structured data markup: microdata, microformats, and RDFa. We’ve decided to focus on just one format for schema.org to create a simpler story for webmasters and to improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. We’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats.

Microdata is a set of tags that is compatible to HTML5 that allows you to display rich snippets for markup types including:

Creative works: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries

Embedded non-text objects: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject

Event

Organization

Person

Place, LocalBusiness, Restaurant

Product, Offer, AggregateOffer

Review, AggregateRating

To markup web page’s content using Microdata:

http://schema.org/docs/gs.html

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets allow webmasters with websites containing structured data/content (including review sites, etc) to label their content so each piece of text represents a certain type of data. The structured data/content won’t appear to visitors to webmasters’ sites, but will help Google better understand and present information from webmasters’ web pages within Google SEO results.

Google supports 3 types of Rich Snippets formats: