Google is always hard at work to provide better organization and structure for all of their search results and listings – and this is where rich-snippets and Schema.org come into play. See If Google understands your website’s content in a structured way, it can present that content more accurately and more attractively to other Google users. Last week Google announced two brand new features to make working with structured data-types even easier. The first feature is an expansion of the current data highlighter – bringing in 7 brand new types of structured data.
The Google Data Highlighter launched in December 2012 as a point-and-click tool for teaching Google the pattern of structured data about events on your website — without even having to edit your site’s HTML. Now, you can also use Data Highlighter to teach Google about many other kinds of structured data on your site: products, local businesses, articles, software applications, movies,restaurants, and TV episodes. To access the Google Data Highlighter visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the “Optimization” link in the left sidebar, and then click “Data Highlighter”.
While the Google Data Highlighter is a great way to quickly teach Google about your site’s structured data without having to edit your HTML, it’s ultimately preferable to embed structured data markup directly into your web pages, so your structured content is available to everyone. To assist you with that task, Google has launched their second new tool: the Structured Data Markup Helper.
Like with the Data Highlighter, you start by submitting a web page (URL or HTML source) and using your mouse to “tag” the key properties of the relevant data type. When you’re done, the Structured Data Markup Helper generates sample HTML code with microdata markup included. This code can be downloaded and used as a guide as you implement structured data on your website.
