These articles from Google and Bing explain how structured data markup can help them to help your site in search results.
Because machines cannot always interpret human language correctly, this helps by giving them some pointers that put the words in context and explicitly state their meaning. For example, if your article mentions Apple, a bot does not know if you are talking about a type of fruit or a well known computer company. A human would probably know by the context in which the word “apple” was used, a bot may need some additional help. That is where structured data comes in and clears up any ambiguity.
Use of structured data is of course optional. Maybe for now you just want to concentrate on creating, styling and making the site responsive. Once you have that, you may want to consider adding markup. I say this because it can lead to some complex nesting of <span>s or <div>s (or other elements) which may confuse things during the initial development stage.
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