What is Microdata?
Microdata is a structured data format for adding metadata to a webpage. Metadata refers to data that provides additional context and meaning to the content of a webpage. Search engines use it to understand the webpage and display rich snippets in search results.
You can create microdata using specialized software or plugins. You can also write the code in HTML. The microdata is not visible on the front end and can only be viewed in the source code. An example is provided below:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> <span itemprop="name">John Doe</span> <img itemprop="image" src="john-doe.jpg" alt="John" doe> <div itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress"> <span itemprop="streetAddress">123 Main St</span>, <span itemprop="addressLocality">New York</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">NY</span>, <span itemprop="postalCode">10001</span> </div> <span itemprop="telephone">(123) 456-7890</span> </div>
That said, microdata is one of the methods for adding structured data to a webpage. You can also add structured data to a webpage using JSON-LD and RDF.