RDFa, microdata, structured data and SEO

[nealrm]

Does anyone have a good idea of how RDFa or other structured data format affect SEO? I'm guessing that since the search engines can better read your site, it should help. But, I'm interested in anyone that has first hand information.

[patrickprecisione]

I've tried to mess around with it a bit but found it difficult as well. Have you been to schema.org yet?

[nealrm]

Yes - I went with RDFa for the home page markup. I used one of the verification tools. After a couple to tries I did get everything to work. I just don't know how much it will help.

[Taylor]

Structured Data helps search engines (Google Yahoo and Bing) to understand all the information of a webpage. Like, If it is contact us page then you can add the address mark up to clear your location to search engine. You can also use person mark up (on about us page about the owner) to show that who is on which position in the company. It is natural that Google will prefer that website to which they better understand.

I use these markup's on our client's websites and I have to say that they are really helpful. But it is not necessary that they will work as after all it depends on Google but this is the thing which is called "Optimization".

[Gabe]

It definitely helps. Essentially, it tell the search engines how to interpret (and use) the data. Think about it: the point of a search engine is to help searchers find what they're looking for. You want that to be you. The point of SEO is to tells the search engines that you have what the users are looking for. Structured data allow you to more eloquently speak to the search engines.

A website that doesn't use structured data is at a serious disadvantage. That disadvantage just isn't so obvious yet because so few are using it. Here are two image examples from demos I did for customers:


This is an example of local SEO. Not only do the listings stand out more, but they provide useful information like address and phone number to make it easier for a customer to contact you. Additionally, they're placed higher than the normal results.
http://justaddcontent.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/justaddcontent-local-seo.png (http://justaddcontent.com/business-website-features/)

This is an example of video SEO. A video thumbnail like these makes your search results more likely to be clicked because they stand out and they're eye-catching when compared to normal results. It can (and should) also be accompanied by a video sitemap on your website to help search engines find the videos.
http://justaddcontent.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/justaddcontent-video-seo.png (http://justaddcontent.com/business-website-features/)

There are plenty of other kinds of structured website data (i.e. opening hours), but these are some of the more common uses. HTML5 is particularly useful for this, which is why we switched to using it exclusively.

Structured data can be complicated to implement, but it doesn't have to be. For example, we set it up so it works automatically on our customers' sites. If you're using WordPress, you can do it pretty easily with Yoast's Local SEO plugin (http://yoast.com/wordpress/local-seo/), which is a premium add-on to his free SEO plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/) (links to plugin page in WordPress repository, it's a free download). Yoast also has a premium add-on for video SEO.