Google, Bing and Yahoo have just announced the launch of Schema.org, which is a new way for webmasters to provide information about their websites in a clear, structured way that all search engines understand.  Similar to the Sitemaps.xml structure which allows all webmasters deliver a single sitemap for all search engines, we will now be able to ‘tag’ data in websites to provide across the board information about the data that is contained.

You’ve probably already seen the results of such markup in Google with the use of rich snippets in search results for recipes (see below), reviews, movies and more.

Supported markup type for rich snippets include:

• Reviews and Ratings
• Shopping and Products
• Events
• Restaurants
• Books, Movies and Music
• Recipes

A full list of schema is available at http://schema.org/docs/full.html. Schema.org also provides lots of information and examples on how to set up your web pages to include the markup.  Google Webmaster Tool also has help and a handy tool to test your markup.

So, let’s get busy with schema markup!