Microdata

Microdata is a type of specification language that is embedded within HTML content to improve annotate elements, machine readability and analyze web pages. This type of markup language provides labels to identify different pieces of content, allowing the search engine to highlight or emphasize more relevant information. For example, using microdata can point users without scrolling the whole page towards the rating of a product.

The website, Schema.ORG, was established to provide technical documentation and HTML code for organizations by Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo by major search engine operators to take advantage of Microsoft.

The language used for the microdata can be understood by those developers who are familiar with HTML/CSS. Similar to metadata, this machine-readable schema is written by wrapping a snippet of code with the language tag, which does not affect the syntax of the browser or document. Types of information using the Microdata language tag are images, author, publication date, headlines, breadcrumb, review and format type.

Successfully implementing MicroData can improve search engine optimization (SEO) ranking and user readability as well as click-through rates. Google's structured data testing tool offers web developers the ability to view websites through Google's algorithm to analyze the results of the microdata.