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When you create a web page, search engines find it hard to understand specific elements. This is why SEO and structured data go hand in hand.

Structured Data helps search engines better understand what the content is specifically about. Moreover, structured data will allow users to see the value of a website before they visit, via rich snippets, which are rich data that are displayed in the SERPs.

For example, you can use it to list all the important data regarding your organization: name, address, place of business. You can also use it to add more complex data such as articles, event (or events), service (or services), product (or products), various online resources, software that people can download etc.

Structured data is a HTML markup that comes as a code.

As you can see in the image below that, adding structured data in your website will give the user the ability to showcase a rich snippet (or snippets) for example.

The additional lines of text or images in search results, as highlighted in red below :

Structured Data

Structured data can also create a good result for users.

Among other things it can provide best info regarding a company given that marketing management itself has presented that company within a page.

In that regard, it is great for optimization but can also work very well for web users.

Even though Google’s algorithm is very complex, it often fails to understand which category to assign to each information from the page. A test can be done by analyzing your personal website with Google Highlighter tool from Webmaster Tools.

In case a directory which is not using structured data is being tested, one can easily see that Google overlooks up to 80% of the data, or just doesn’t understand the meaning. Google might not understand that a string of numbers is in fact a phone number, and that’s because webmasters use different methods of listing phone numbers. This could also happen with other types of data as product name, category, location and so on.

Even though you can use any type of structured data ( Microformats, Microdata, RDFa, Data marked up using Data Highlighter), schema.org is a project recommended not only by Google, Bing and Yahoo, but also by many SEOs.