Adding schema markup to your pages is one of the least utilized optimization techniques when it comes to SEO. It may look very complicated. However, it is worth understanding this dark art as it will help you improve your position in search results.
What is Schema Markup and Structured Data?
We all know that search engine bots crawl websites to extract information from html. This information is then fed to algorithms that determine the keywords that page is relevant to and how it stacks up vs the competition.
Schema Markup and structured data is a way to add data to the website which is easily parsed by search algorithms.
Google Rich snippets is an example based on Schema Markup. Schema Markup is a standardized form of data organized in a shared vocabulary founded by the major search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex.
Structured data allows us to bind content to appropriate values. For example, if an address is written in the contact section of your page, you should add an attribute property indicating that it is an address. This may seem obvious to us, but search engines cannot understand the semantics of an address unless we state that it is indeed an address.
There are several reasons for the use of Markup Schema. Some of the most popular reasons to display information about are businesses, events, people, products, recipes, and reviews. All of these types of items have different types of markups specific to them.
Does Schema Markup Help SEO?
Schema markup gives you the opportunity to feed the search engine with more information. Search engines will present this markup in search results and optimize your page for a specific niche like local businesses, software applications, etc.
Only one-third of Google search results contain rich snippets, however, it is a good opportunity to improve visibility. Rich snippets are known to improve the click-through rate and visibility for users by up to 30%.
Schema Markup Supported by Google
There are numerous schema markups but Google only supports a limited number of markups that show rich snippets. Here are some examples of supported schema markups that Google has developed:
- Organization Schema Markup – defines the author of the content which ensures ownership.
- Breadcrumbs Markup – represents place of the page in the hierarchy of the site.
- Review, Product & Offer Schema Markup which is the most used and popular portrays the review or ranking of a product.
- Recipe Schema Markup – recipes can show certain components like ingredients and ranking.
- FAQ Schema Markup– extracts snippets from sites that answer most common questions. Similar to this is How-to Schema Markup.
- Article schema markup – your article is added to a carousel displayed on the top with image and blog header. This is only available in mobile devices.
For a full list of Google schema markups, you can check them out here.
Final thoughts and Considerations
Adding schema markup is a very simple technique to feed more data to the search engine. Giving the search engine more data points will allow it to enrich your search result and position your page in frontv of the correct users while improving your click-through rate.
Doing it the right way will allow you to easily jump ahead of the herd.
In our next article, we will provide you with the steps of how to create and add schema markup to your pages.
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Veteran content writer with focus on Technology and SEO.
