Search engines do a good job identifying with the overall content of a web page is about but you may have parts of a web page that contained very specific types of content like product reviews, and embedded video or even a food recipe. Search engines can stand to benefit from a little help in understanding the semantic focus of these bits of content. Fortunately, we can give them some assistance.
One universal code format that will help us to this is a schema.org micro-format. Micro-formats give us a special syntax to use to help search engines identify very specific types of content on your pages. This, not only help search engines identify these pieces of content; it also helps some identify very specific attributes of your content.
Here’s an example of some recipe text. We can look at this quickly and identify it as a food recipe.
But for a search engine the short sentences and many line breaks are a bit awkward and they can’t possibly understand what each line really means. By augmenting the code behind this recipe text using the schema.org micro-format for recipes, you have the opportunity to explicitly tells search engines exactly what this content is:
You can see that there are properties for ingredients, prep and cook times and just about anything else that you could think of for a recipe. If you think about this from the search engines perspective, knowing not just that this is definitely a food recipe but also knowing all of this meta-data around the recipe will happen to return this content the users they are looking for.
If someone is searching for a particular recipe or has an abundance of apples and need something to do with them, the search engines will have a much deeper semantic understanding of what this content truly is and they can return in the search results for an array of relevant search queries.
Head over to schema.org and browse the various types of content that have supported micro-formats recipes are just one of many. You can use micro formatting to describe a book with things like title, author, publishing date and number of pages. Or you could use micro formatting to identify an upcoming event by its name, location, dates or even pricing.
If you have a brick and mortar business or you’re doing e-commerce sales, make sure that you are using micro formats for your local business content or your product content. As a general rule anytime you can specifically identify content for search engines you probably should. Explore the different formats to see what may be relevant for the different types of content on your site and get started sharing all that great information with the search engines and your visitors alike.
