Structured data (also referred to as ‘Semantic data’, ‘rich snippets’ and ‘Schema org’) is concerned with data/information/markup that tells the search engines what the content of the search results is about.
Technical concepts like this make the most sense using examples, so let's look at what structured data looks like in practice:
So structured data is about highlighting the information bits for a page in the search result. For a shoe model, it will be close to highlighting the images of the shoes, as well as the price, colors and stock status.
For recipe recipes, it is relevant to highlight “bits” as preparation time, image and stars (reports).
It is easy to see why the word “rich snippets” is one of the many terms: your search results show more enriched, and with information that extends beyond the ordinary text elements.
Why use structured data? The search engines are, as we know, kind of secretful about how their algorithms weigh different elements on a given website, and a lot of pretend that using structured data is not a directly ranking factor. Yet we know that a page that has good and relevant data highlighted in its search results will get more clicks than a similar page that has not implemented this. There is also a great consensus in the SEO environment that structured data will become much more important in the future.
Structured data allows you to display important content to the user before he visits the site, and since most websites per day do not use this, one will dominate and stand out more in the search result than the competitors.
Google Shopping is a feature of the Google search that has increased in scope in the last few years. Several online track experts say that in a few years we will make many purchases via the Google Shopping interface without go into the actual online store. Here we will be able to filter by size, price, colors and types, and Google Shopping will bring out the products from online stores that offer products that match our needs.
Structured data containing the different attributes of products will be a prerequisite for the products to be obtained at this interface. If many of the purchases on the web take place outside the online store, like in an advanced version of Google Shopping, is a major opportunity for e-commerce business to fail to manage their structured data.
How? Structured data (Schema.org) is not automatically highlighted by Google. It is a form of ‘vokabular’ and its associated tags that are added to the HTML code. In a familiar style, Google has good guidelines and associated testing tools that help you implement structured data correctly: