An Introduction to Structured Data
Introduction
Today, if we analyze, there is immense amount of information and knowledge spread all over. The online world or web world is no exception. It is said that, if a single person wish to store the information he has in his mind, it takes around 32 GB of space to store data of 1hr of information. And as we say this, we can imagine the amount of data being uploaded and published daily on the web, all over the world. And at the same time, only uploading the data online is not sufficient, it has to reach to the right audience. This is where the roll of Search Engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing comes in. The crawlers/bots of these search engines constantly search for updated data online and register it to their directories time and again. But at the same time these crawlers sometime face difficulties while understanding the kind of content on a site. There could be various reasons behind it, like wrong coding, unwanted/ unstructured tags, wrong keywords/description etc. To overcome this issues & difficulties, the search engine giants like Google, Bing, Yahoo! & Yandex has joined the hands together.
How it works?
This site schema.org provide us with collection of various tools/schema like html tags, implementation of which, can immensely benefit all the parties involved in the transaction. When structured schemas are used by a webmaster, it makes easier for search crawlers to identify and present the relevant content to end user, who search through keywords. If he finds the content he was looking for, automatically the user engagement will increase, resulting in higher credibility for webpage on SERP.
These schemas also helps search crawlers to give results of search query in much structured way, resulting in better user experience on web. This probably is the reason why 80% population on the web uses advance search engines like Google, yahoo & Bing.
There are mainly three types/standards of structured data model i.e. Microdata, Microformats & RDF (Resource Description Framework). But to stand out from the rest, schema has used Microdata for structured data markup. And there is logic behind. And the logic is – Relevancy is the key in web searches. Now to obtain that relevancy in search & results, what actually was needed is something that will strike the balance between Extensibility of RDF & Simplicity of Mricroformats. Microdata does exactly the same. Hence schema.org depends heavily on Microdata so as to serve better to all three search engine results.
Future of Schema
It is no rocket science to understand that, technological advancement is the need of the hour. And those who walk with it, will survive. Schema.org gives immense power to the web world. It looks like, with increasing usage of internet all over the world, there is huge demand of intellectual’s in this field. Following are the point worth to check out –
a) Nearly 80% population on web uses Search Engines like Google, yahoo & Bing. There collaboration, looks like, has given good result, which indicate that Sites using their technology will ride the wave.
b) Increasing popularity amongst the user will boost the online presence of business, which will require technically strong people, which implies that there is huge Job Potential in the domain in near future.
c) Schema will soon, with ever increasing popularity, become the most used platform for structured data.
