To markup an Event Page on your website to display the Events' start date and location on search engines, we need to incorporate a few SEO rich snippets. Using Schema.org's SEO markup, we will need to mark-up the following information for an Event to display accordingly on search results:
- Event Name
- Event Starting Date
- Location or Venue Name
- Address
The above is the least required to make an event display the "startdate" and "location" on search engine results pages, as far as I was able to determine. Upon integration of the Schema event markup, we will verify results with the Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool.
Let's use the following event data as an example:
Raw Event HTML
<div>
<h1>Test Event</h1>
<img src="event-main-image.jpg" />
<p>This is the events description and/or introduction.</p>
When:
Saturday, May 3, 12:00 am to Sunday, May 4, 12:00 am
Where:
Test Event Center,
28 Test Street
Los Angeles, CA 90024
P: 424-123-4567
</div>Now, here is how it looks with the added Schema rich snippets:
<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Event">
<h1 itemprop="name">Test Event</h1>
<img src="event-main-image.jpg" itemprop="photo" />
<p itemprop="description">This is the events description and/or introduction</p>
When:
<meta content="2014-05-03T12:00:59-07:00" itemprop="startDate" />
<meta content="2014-05-04T12:00:59-07:00" itemprop="endDate" />
Saturday, May 3, 12:00 am to Sunday, May 4, 12:00 am
Where:
<div itemtype="http://schema.org/Place" itemscope="" itemprop="location">
<span itemprop="name">Test Event Center</span>,
<div itemtype="http://schema.org/PostalAddress" itemscope="" itemprop="address">
<span itemprop="streetAddress">28 Test Street</span>
<span itemprop="addressLocality">Los Angeles</span>, <span itemprop="addressRegion">CA</span> <span itemprop="postalCode">90024</span>
</div>
<abbr title="Phone">P:</abbr> <span itemprop="telephone">424-123-4567</span>
</div>
</div>Upon adding the markup, we are able to see the results on the rich snippet testing tool, simply by copy & pasting the above code into the structured data testing tool: google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
The resulting sample output would then be:
Event Schema Markup
There is far more data that have corresponding SEO rich snippet markups, which you can find on schema.org.
Please feel free to comment any further examples, questions, thoughts or improvements.
