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Semantic Markup for Products

Written by Peter Devereaux | Mar 1, 2013 6:00:00 AM

Looking for Information on Schema Markup for Merchants/Internet Retailers/Ecommerce Merchants? Read An Introduction to Structured Markup for Merchants now.

The semantic markup for actual products is one of the challenging types covered in Website Magazine's Semantic Markup Crash Course. This schema is used to identify information relating to a product, including price, reviews, a product ID and even manufacturer information. Additional details such as the aggregate rating based on average rating and overall numbers of reviews is also possible.

Ecommerce merchants are not the only ones that can use the product schema. Information publishers and digital service providers, too, can leverage this specific markup for any materials they produce and sell(e.g. ebooks, whitepapers, etc.). Keep in mind that best practices dictate that the main topic of a page be about that specific product (product markup on listing pages is not supported by the search engines however), and the product should be available for purchase on that same page.

STEP ONE: The first step is to declare the vocabulary being used and the scope of the properties to add. This is achieved by adding the itemtype attributes on the outermost element that contains the other elements that contain the actual data.

Once that's in place, it's necessary to define the actual microdata properties from the https://schema.org/Event vocabulary. The entire list of properties is available on that page consequently.

STEP TWO: The next step is to actually add the item properties for the information and construct it in the correct way. Here's an example (with a preview of how it might look) of Website Magazine book Affiliate 360 - The Fundamentals of Performance Marketing: