Testing video object schema coding on a new page

In the hard slog towards building a true Semantic Web, “rich data” is one of the stops. Marking video, audio, article content, products and many other types of data allows it to be categorized much more easily, and in a much more precise, specific and versatile way than old HTML meta tags.

We have recently created a new furniture liquidators page on the website of our client Universal Hotel Liquidators; we have marked an embedded video on the page with extensive rich data.

In order to validate rich data snippets, you can use the convenient Google structured data validation tool, which allows you to input any URL and see if the meta data is entered correctly. In this post, you can see an example of meta data testing on the new page we added for our client.

While most, if not all, of the fields can be omitted – for example, you can enter the video thumbnail URL but not the video’s duration – the more information you enter, the more capabilities your site will have for organizing and managing your data, and the more likely your data will be to get properly parsed and categorized by search engines. This is why using structured data properly is important for online businesses, if they want to increase the chance of their products showing up in online shopping directories such as Google Shopping.

This is only a small sample of what structured data can do for you and your site; mastering this powerful tool will only become more important as more activity happens online.