I created this presentation as an activity in my company to provide introduction to Microdata and how we can use it to create Google Rich Snippets.

1. Introduction to Microdata & Google Rich Snippets
by Kishan Gor
Plus91 Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Adding Value to Healthcare

2. • Need of Semantics
• Need of Microdata
• What is Microdata?
• Microdata Syntax
• Microdata Example
• What is Google Rich Snippets?
• Snippets that Google Understands
• Google Rich Snippets Example
• Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool
• Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool Example
• Conclusion

3.  Machines cannot understand the content and the
context.
 Making sense out of the web content is too hard
for machines.
 If they have to understand everything, they have
to be able to understand natural languages, every
language.
 So semantics were helpful to provide meaning to
the web content and help understand the content
by annotating them.

4.  HTML5 is not only about new presentational
elements. It adds several semantic tags.
 Everyone comes up with their need for new
semantic elements. It’s not practical to put an
element in specification to accommodate each
and every semantics to provide relevant meaning.
 New formats like Microdata, Microformats and
RDFa for data markup were created to
accommodate such needs.

5.  Quoting from WHATWG Microdata Specificaiton:
◦ Sometimes, it is desirable to annotate content with specific machine-readable labels, e.g. to allow
generic scripts to provide services that are customized to the page, or to enable content from a variety
of cooperating authors to be processed by a single script in a consistent manner.
◦ For this purpose, authors can use the microdata features described in this section. Microdata allows
nested groups of name-value pairs to be added to documents, in parallel with the existing content.
 Microdata annotates the DOM with scoped name/value pairs from
custom vocabularies.
 Microdata vocabularies provide the semantics, or meaning of an Item.
Web developers can design a custom vocabulary or use vocabularies
available on the web. A collection of commonly used markup
vocabularies are provided by Schema.org schemas which include:
Person, Event, Organization, Product, Review, Review-aggregate,
Breadcrumb, Offer, Offer-aggregate. Major search engine operators like
Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve search
results.

6.  Microdata is assigned by giving attributes to any
HTML element that contains the content.
 Attributes available:
◦ Itemscope - Indicates the element is a microdata element and its child
elements are part of its microdata format.
◦ Itemtype - Defines the vocabulary to be used by the microdata format.
◦ Itemid - Allows a vocabulary to define a global identifier for a
microdata item, for example an ISBN number on a book.
◦ Itemprop - An individual data element.
◦ Itemref - Allows a microdata element to reference another element on
the page to define it by either HTML id or by itemid.

8.  Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search
result—are designed to give users a sense for what’s on the
page and why it’s relevant to their query.
 Google Supports Microdata, Microformat and RDFa. But
Microdata is recommended by Google.

9.  Google supports rich snippets for these content
types:
◦ Reviews
◦ People
◦ Products
◦ Businesses and organizations
◦ Recipes
◦ Events
◦ Music

10.  Let’s take an example of Product content type.
 A webpage from a store is displayed as below.
Product and it’s data is marked up using microdata
and google interprets the data.

12.  Structured Data Testing Tool can be used to test your Google
Rich Snippets.
 You can use tool at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
 You can view preview of the content in Search result by either
giving the URL to the page or using posting HTML content.
 Along with Google Search preview, it will display all the
structured data is has collected from the page.
 It will also warn you if any property is illegal for used
vocabulary.

15.  Previous Rich Snippet preview was generated
using this annotated HTML data:

16.  Microdata may not be very useful with Browsers because they
rarely do anything with those data today but there are
chances they may start using them in future.
 But if you are structuring you data with microdata using
popular vocabulary Schema.org, search engines will be greatly
benefited from the content. And in return, they will be able to
show more relevant results to users, so you will have better
chances at attracting users if you have relevant content and
properly annotated data.

17. Kishan Gor
Software Developer, Plus91 Technologies.
Web: http://ksg91.com
Email: kishan.gor@plus91.in
Twitter: @ksg91
Facebook: http://facebook.com/ksg91
Questions?