Who benefits from structured data?

Web Developers

To developers, and especially to search engines, webpages are encoded content. At a glance, the code can be overwhelming, if not indecipherable to typical site visitors. Nevertheless, those codes are what compose the on-page content that site visitors read.

Structured data helps web developers organize this content and define its significance, allowing them to create pages that are understood and embraced by search engines as well as site visitors.

Site Visitors

To site visitors, webpages are interpretable content - images, text, instructions, information, opinions, feedback and more. Thanks to common sense and on-page context clues, browsers can place appropriate emphasis on certain elements of text to help understand what a page is all about.

Structured data helps search engines craft informative snippets site visitors can learn from. The snippets are displayed below links in the search results, and give site visitors a glimpse into what each page is about without having to navigate away from the SERP.

Search Engines

Having a clearer understanding of the essence of a particular webpage makes indexing it in the proper SERPs all the more enjoyable (and accurate!). Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms to accommodate influential trends and weed out irrelevant results- and of course, they're constantly competing with one another to deliver the most reliable resources on the Web.

Structured data helps search engines gain a more human-like understanding of the types of content on a page, and helps them maintain their search indexes accordingly.

Now that you know who benefits from structured data and microformats, check out a real example of structured data in a website we hand-coded with microformats from the ground-up.