In May of this year, the triumvirate of Google, Yahoo, and Bing got everyone talking about structured data with their announcement of Schema.org, a new way for the search engines to understand web pages. They said that if web content authors added a little bit of metadata to their pages—just a few vocabulary terms—then their search results would show up better in all three search engines.

This poses a challenge for a lot of web authors, though, who don’t have experience with the different syntaxes for adding structured data to HTML: microformats, RDFa, and microdata. It’s been made more challenging because Google, the most influential search engine for many web authors, has indicated that it will only process microdata, which is the newest of the three syntaxes and doesn’t have much tool support yet.

I'll explain the differences between these three syntaxes, demonstrate some of the support in Drupal, and show some of the neat things you can do with them besides SEO.

Features speaker: Lin Clark