You may have noticed specialized renderings of specific data in Google search results, like so:
You might think these are proprietary arrangements between Google and other sites – I imagine many may be, but the technology that powers them is easily available, called “microformats”. Microformats are essentially a loose schema describing a type of data in your site. There are a few hundred different data types – common ones being events, reviews, download links, and metadata about different types of businesses.
These are beneficial if you want someone to make use of whatever you’re providing (making easier for them to find downloads for your software, for instance). There seems to be a schema that provides a data table from your site, and they do seem to put links to the source material with the summary table in the search results, so this may be a valid form of SEO tinkering as well.
Regardless, it’s a neat feature, and pretty easy to use. If you just want yellow stars to show up in search results, there is a nice WordPress plugin1 that supports some of the most common types (I have no affiliation with the author).
If you want to do something fancier, the best option is to go to schema.org, and look at the examples.
For instance, you want to link an MP3, they give you an example like so:
12oclock_girona.mp3
Recorded on a terrace of Girona a sunday morning
To find this, go to http://schema.org/AudioObject:
The schema objects have a ton of attributes, which is pretty overwhelming. If you scroll to the bottom, you can get an HTML example like the above, for whatever type you like:
Once you have this, it’s pretty easy to drop into React or whatever you’re using, and customize it to have the right data.
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/ [↩]