Utah.gov is enabling search engines to better digest, consume, and understand our content by adding semantic codes within the webpages. These codes are not displayed to the user but are seen by search engines to more clearly classify and organize the content.

Schema tags and rich snippets were added to high traffic pages like the Governor, First Lady, Lt Governor, Senate, Treasurer, and the State Parks pages.

Bing, Google and Yahoo formed Schema.org in 2011 to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages. They proposed using Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats to mark up website content with metadata about itself. Search engine spiders and other parsers can recognize these standardized markups, thereby gaining access to the meaning of the sites.

Example of Semantic Search:
Using markup from schema.org, each Utah Senator's page is tagged with microdata labeling the senator as a Person. (itemtype=http://schema.org/Person)