Question

I’m new to SEO and heard that using microdata tags in html can dramatically improve SEO. So, for one of my pages, the schema type is an organization… in particular a sports team. One of the properties for a sports team is the members. So, I have the following code:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/SportsTeam">
   <span itemprop="name">New York Yankees</span>
   <span itemprop="members">Derek Jeter</span>
</div>

The “members” itemprop has to be a person itemscope (http://schema.org/Person). What is the format for nesting one itemscope inside of another?

Answer 1

From the Google article on microdata tags:

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The example below shows the same HTML, but in this case, it includes the address property.

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Person">
   My name is <span itemprop="name">Bob Smith</span>, 
   but people call me <span itemprop="nickname">Smithy</span>.
   Here is my homepage: 
   <a href="http://www.example.com" itemprop="url">www.example.com</a>.
   I live in 
   <span itemprop="address" itemscope
      itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Address">
      <span itemprop="locality">Albuquerque</span>, 
      <span itemprop="region">NM</span> 
   </span>
   and work as an <span itemprop="title">engineer</span>
   at <span itemprop="affiliation">ACME Corp</span>.
</div>

Here’s how this sample works:

The address property is itself an item, containing its own set of properties. This is indicated by putting the itemscope attribute on the item that declares the address property, and using the itemtype attribute to specify the type of item being described, like this: <span itemprop="address" itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Address">.

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I would add that microtags are in their infancy, so you cannot guarantee that the specification will remain intact for very long. I personally predict that the blackhat SEO guys are going to be all over this, and it’ll be a headache for Google to keep up with the tricks. So, whilst they might provide you a temporary SEO boost, don’t rely on them too heavily.

On a more positive note, I can certainly see these microtags being useful for non-SEO purposes, especially in the field of screen-readers. Fun stuff!