Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all working together to help web developers and their own search engines to display more relevant data, the latest thing they have come up with is structured data. What structured data does is help to identify what kind of information is being diplayed on a website. They are already good at finding keywords and phrases, but they want to know is what that keyword (or phrase) is describing.
For example if the words are “Art Show”, is this page trying to sell tickets to the art show (“Art Show” is referencing a product) or is it a review of a past art show (“Art Show” is referencing a review). Why this is important is that if the page is for a product, then by using structured data tags you can easily tag and target text on the page as the price, or if it is a review you can give it a 5 star rating with your tags. Then when you use a search engine to find these terms, the search engine will know to display you the price or stars. It will also help your web pages get better SEO if the search engines can get more specific information about your web page.
Of course it gets much more complex with all the different types of data you can tag and display, you can also include reviews inside of products if it is applicable. A website has been created which will help you pick the relevant tags and show you how to use them, schema.org It is very easy to use these tags within existing website tags or wrapping text in span tags. Example below.
<div itemprop=”review” itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Review”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Art Show at AGO</span>
<meta itemprop=”worstRating” content = “1”>
<span itemprop=”ratingValue”>1</span>/<span itemprop=”bestRating”>5</span>stars
<span itemprop=”description”>Very beautiful artwork, I wanted to bring it home with me</span>
</div>