I have a listings style website. Due to the nature of this (listings) the site is content light. Each page is typically less that 50 words but there are many pages.

The site in question has had a ton of media coverage and so has some great inbound links from places like Wired, Fast Company, Canada Broadcasting Corporation and many many other bloggers, media websites and recycle related niche authors (It's a recycling site).

But Google really ignores it. Traffic from search is very very low - less than 5% of all traffic.

I know that using markup you can tell Google whether your site is a restaurant, article, review, shop, local business and a few other categories (https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/).

Is there a way to tell Google that my site is a listings site? I suspect, but do not know for sure, that part of the problem is that Google simply does not know what my site is?

It's a crowdmap where people post curbalerts. The information is useful to people but it is presented in a short, concise way - a pin on a map, a picture and a short description. Adding anything further is not necessary for the site's intended purpose.

1st question - how best to tell the search engines what y site is - listings and not some spammy website? Any recommendations in improving our site's Search presence?

You can take a look here if interested: http://tinyurl.com/lxg4hn7