A while ago someone linked me to a page that showed a way using HTML to specify types of data, but I can’t remember what they’re called. It essentially allowed you to do something like this:
<div datatype='film'>
<span datatype='title'>True Stories</span><span datatype='created'>1986</span>
Cast: <span datatype='person'><span datatype='name'>David Byrne</span></span>
</div>
This was extended to just about every type of data out there, from books to photographs. Can anyone jog my memory and tell me what these are called and how they are formatted? It was supposed to help search engines with determining what they were looking at. I’ve tried searching for information on meta tags, but I’m not getting anywhere.
I think what you are looking for is http://schema.org.
This style of markup can help you in getting rich snippets to show up in the SERPs
Here is a handy tool for testing your markup
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets