One of the new features in Joomla! 3.3 is the addition of microdata. This is a very exciting feature as it allows for a major boost in SEO for both your individual articles and site as a whole.
What is Microdata?
Microdata is a method of including contextual information to your site and articles. This allows the search engines to more thoroughly understand the information on your pages.
Search engines then take this information and use it to answer the more natural language queries that are entered. This means the searcher will be shown more relevant search results.
You can use microdata to explain almost anything about your subject using ‘schemas’. There are many already available and more are being added constantly. Search engines tend to currently use the vocabularies provided by schema.org.
How do I use Microdata?
In our research of the current Joomla 3.3 beta, we did not discover any settings or toggle switches to enable microdata. We did, however find that it is already implemented within Joomla! core. This means that you currently do not have to do anything for normal articles, blog posts, etc. You can see the implementation in our screenshot below. Notice that the highlighted areas displays the itemprop tag Article Body and the reference to the itemtype of scheme.org/Article.
Extensions with Microdata
Along with the new microdata feature in the core code, there are several extensions that assist with adding microdata for specific functions. These include microdata markup for social media interactions such as Facebook and Google+. There are others that help enhance the various Maps programs, and even ecommerce with VirtueMart. Be sure to check out the extensions library to see which ones may help your site.
