Importance of Structured Data in SEO

                          Structured Data is one of the important factors of on-page optimization. To achieve better rankings and consequently gaining targeted traffic from competitors it is important to maintain structured data for a site.
 Structured data is being used in RDFa and micro formats from past few years. But when it actually went on live with search engines like Google then it was seen as insufficient. With the help of Living Standard HTML and new microdata attributes, a new own standard called schema.org was created by search engines and they have more control over structured data. 

Why Structured Data makes sense

Search engines can even parse and comprehend complex information even without the help of structured data but it will not be complete and exact. For example, a page may list an event but it will not be exact without structured data. While schema.org makes work easy by writing schemas for HTML where in it cannot be changed how a user views the data. At the same time it also provides search bots with sufficient data.
Now there is each type of schemas for every type of structured data such as Person, product, event, organization, movie, book, review etc. There are tools for creating schemas.

What is the need of using structured data?

Even search engines are particular about using structured data which can be understood by usage of structured data dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools.

Google gives much importance for pages with structured data in SERPs. This can be observed as we can see pages using structured data at top. Also usage of structured data has increased rapidly.
Schema Creators:
With the increased usage of structured data for sites, schema creators are introduced where in these tools help us to create schemas without much difficulty.