Structured data is a system of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorize and index your content. Schema is recognized (and in fact the vocabulary is maintained) by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. It's unclear whether other search engines are using this markup to change how they display search results.
Structured data is a form of semantic mark-up designed to describe elements on a web page e.g. review, person, event etc. This mark-up can be combined with typical HTML properties to define each item type through the use of associated attributes.
For example, ‘Person’ has the properties name, url and title – attributes can be applied to HTML tags to describe each property:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person">
Name: <span itemprop="name">Sahil Popli</span>
Website: <a href="http://popli.me" itemprop="url">popli.me</a>
Title: <span itemprop="title">UI/UX Developer</span>
</div>
- Itemscope – is an indicator that the content within this is an item.
- Itemtype – describes what the item is, in the above instance ‘Person’.
- Itemprop – describes each property of the specific item.
Structured data can be used to mark up all kinds of items from products to events to recipes. It is most often used to provide additional information about the following:
- Creative work
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Place
- Product
A full list of items you can mark up with Schema is available here.
