Why structured data and schema markup are important
There are two audiences that you’ll always have to keep in mind when marketing your site online: humans and machines. Let’s spell this out a little bit more:
Your website and its content is read by people who are interested in learning more about you and what you do. It is also read by “crawlers” that are reading the code and text of your site trying to figure out what you are trying to convey. Many people tend to forget about that crawlers is also a crucial part of their audience.
Many people tend to talk about the importance of content creation and the distribution of content through the right channels. What they forget is that the content must also be “readable”: to crawlers. This is exactly where schema markup and structured data tends to come into place.
We’re going to help you understand the importance of this topic without getting super technical. To give you a clear understanding of some of the terms we’ll be referring to in this post we’ll start off with some simple definitions you’ll need to know:
- Crawler (Web Crawler): A web crawler, also referred to as a spider, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, for the purpose of indexing the web. To give you a brief explanation of this, a crawler “reads” website code and content, then indexes it accordingly.
- Index (Web Index): A web index or search index is a list of web pages that a search engine is aware of.
- Schema Markup: This is code that you place on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.
- Structured Data: This refers to a type of data that has a high level of organization, such as information on a relational database. Using structured data helps because when data is highly structured and predictable, crawlers can quickly and accurately identify the information, allowing search engines to organize and display the information in more intuitive ways.
Although some of the definitions above can seem a bit technical, everything will pay off once you get a better understanding of both structured data and schema markup.
Why Content Alone Isn’t King
The phrase that “content is king” is a term that many online marketers have been preaching and wrongfully so in some sense. Putting out a lot of content on the web isn’t going to magically make your site more visible. Assuming you make a lot of great content, it can easily get lost in the billions of pages on the world wide web. If your content isn’t easy crawlable, it won’t get indexed, and if it doesn’t get indexed, you won’t be found.
Making sure your site and the content on it can be accessed by the search engines is the first steps towards gaining visibility.
The First Step is to Make Sure You’re Properly Indexed
When it comes to getting your site indexed in the search engines, you mainly have two options:
- You can just publish your content and wait for both Google and others to find it, which is not the best way to approach this.
- Or, you can be proactive and submit your site to be crawled to the appropriate authorities.
For example, with Google, you can visit the “Submit URL” page on Google Webmaster Tools. You should also set up your site in Google Search Console, where you should submit your sitemap and track how often your site is being crawled.
After the search engines are informed about your site, they’ll still need additional help when it comes to understanding who you are and what you do. Since the crawlers are computers, they don’t interpret and process information the same way a user does. An example of this is when a crawler comes across an image on your website. At that point, it has no idea what the image is about unless we tell it what it’s about. This is where adding in “alt” and “title” tas can help the crawlers understand what an image is all about.
Example: <img src=https://www.yourwebsite.com/skateboarder.jpg” alt=”Picture of a Skateboarder” title=”Skateboarder Doing a Backflip”>
This example is an instance of HTML meta data.
HTML meta data is a form of structured data and is helping when it comes to giving crawlers more context.
Take Advantage of Structured Data by Using Schema Markup
Unlike HTML meta data, schema markup is much more granular and has a variety of different uses. Taking advantage of schema markup to add structure to your data can result in an increase of the search engines’ understanding of the content on your website. It also improves search visibility via rich snippets, featured snippets, and knowledge graph results.
A word of warning: schema markup can be very overwhelming.
This is exactly why many marketers, site owners, and SEO providers tend to avoid using it. Fortunately, with a little practice and some good old trial and error, you can really add a lot of benefit to your site.
According to Schema.org, the word schema is defined as two hierarchies, one for textual property values and another for the things that they help to describe. You can find a list of all the classes schema has been broken into by clicking here. Originally founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, Schema.org vocabularies are developed and maintained as open community process via the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub.
Some of the more commonly used types of Schema include the following:
- Action
- Creative Works like the following: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
- Embedded non-text objects like the following: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Health/Medical types
- Organization
- Person
- Place such as LocalBusiness and Restaurant
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
If you can add Schema to your site, you can give Google and other search engines more details on your content. This helps them better understand your intent and match it with more targeted users. This ultimately leads to not just more visibility, but visibility among users who are likely to convert, which is even better!
[irp]
Types of Schema Markups that All Sites Should Be Using
Organization Schema Markup
The organization schema markup helps generate a few things for your business including brand signals that can enhance your website snippet and a Knowledge Graph entry that appears in the search results on the right-hand column. The key points you’ll want to take advantage of here include the following: corporate contact information, logo, and social profile links.
Website Schema Markup
The WebSite schema markup helps to generate the “Sitelinks Search Box” functionality for brand rankings. For this feature to work, you must have an existing site search on your website to enable to Sitelinks Search Box element.
Breadcrumbs Schema Markup
The BreadcrumbList schema markup allows you to mark up the breadcrumbs on your site, which allows you to generate breadcrumb rich snippets for the pages on your website in the search engine results pages.
Site Navigation Schema Markup
The SiteNavigationElement schema markup can help improve a search engine crawlers’ understanding of your site structure and navigation. This can be used to influence organic site links and help improve indexation and the technical SEO element of your website.
Video Schema Markup
Utilizing the VideoObject schema markup is huge right now, especially given the recent trend of content moving towards video consumption more than any other medium as of right now. A site with embedded or hosted video content can leverage the schema markup to help with rich snippets for YouTube videos as well as your Web pages in the Google video search.
Article Schema Markup
If you’re a blogger or if your company website has a blog (which it totally should), then you’ll want to take advantage of this markup for sure. Depending on your site and the content on it, you’ll want to leverage the NewsArticle schema markup or the BlogPosting schema markup. Taking advantage of these markups accordingly can help to improve visibility for your content in Google News and in-depth article suggestions. Things to note specifically would be to properly use: Headline, Image, and DatePublished.
Conclusion
When it comes to search engine optimization, there is more to it than just ranking and driving traffic. It’s all about driving traffic that engages and converts users.To make sure that your site is being placed in front of the right audience, the search engines themselves have to understand everything about your site, it’s content, and the context in which everything is being presented. By leveraging structured data and schema markup, you can better inform the search engine crawlers that are coming to your site about the content that’s on it.
If you are interested in learning more, check out this post on Search Engine Land, about detailed examples of structured data and schema markup with example codes.
Shay Masand
I like to call myself the 'cool guy' in the office, even though all of my work is virtual. If internet marketing is the jam of business these days, I am the nutella.
There are two audiences that you’ll always have to keep in mind when marketing your site online: humans and machines. Let’s spell this out a little bit more:
Your website and its content is read by people who are interested in learning more about you and what you do. It is also read by “crawlers” that are reading the code and text of your site trying to figure out what you are trying to convey. Many people tend to forget about that crawlers is also a crucial part of their audience.
Many people tend to talk about the importance of content creation and the distribution of content through the right channels. What they forget is that the content must also be “readable”: to crawlers. This is exactly where schema markup and structured data tends to come into place.
We’re going to help you understand the importance of this topic without getting super technical. To give you a clear understanding of some of the terms we’ll be referring to in this post we’ll start off with some simple definitions you’ll need to know:
- Crawler (Web Crawler): A web crawler, also referred to as a spider, is an Internet bot that systematically browses the World Wide Web, for the purpose of indexing the web. To give you a brief explanation of this, a crawler “reads” website code and content, then indexes it accordingly.
- Index (Web Index): A web index or search index is a list of web pages that a search engine is aware of.
- Schema Markup: This is code that you place on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.
- Structured Data: This refers to a type of data that has a high level of organization, such as information on a relational database. Using structured data helps because when data is highly structured and predictable, crawlers can quickly and accurately identify the information, allowing search engines to organize and display the information in more intuitive ways.
Although some of the definitions above can seem a bit technical, everything will pay off once you get a better understanding of both structured data and schema markup.
Why Content Alone Isn’t King
The phrase that “content is king” is a term that many online marketers have been preaching and wrongfully so in some sense. Putting out a lot of content on the web isn’t going to magically make your site more visible. Assuming you make a lot of great content, it can easily get lost in the billions of pages on the world wide web. If your content isn’t easy crawlable, it won’t get indexed, and if it doesn’t get indexed, you won’t be found.
Making sure your site and the content on it can be accessed by the search engines is the first steps towards gaining visibility.
The First Step is to Make Sure You’re Properly Indexed
When it comes to getting your site indexed in the search engines, you mainly have two options:
- You can just publish your content and wait for both Google and others to find it, which is not the best way to approach this.
- Or, you can be proactive and submit your site to be crawled to the appropriate authorities.
For example, with Google, you can visit the “Submit URL” page on Google Webmaster Tools. You should also set up your site in Google Search Console, where you should submit your sitemap and track how often your site is being crawled.
After the search engines are informed about your site, they’ll still need additional help when it comes to understanding who you are and what you do. Since the crawlers are computers, they don’t interpret and process information the same way a user does. An example of this is when a crawler comes across an image on your website. At that point, it has no idea what the image is about unless we tell it what it’s about. This is where adding in “alt” and “title” tas can help the crawlers understand what an image is all about.
Example: <img src=https://www.yourwebsite.com/skateboarder.jpg” alt=”Picture of a Skateboarder” title=”Skateboarder Doing a Backflip”>
This example is an instance of HTML meta data.
HTML meta data is a form of structured data and is helping when it comes to giving crawlers more context.
Take Advantage of Structured Data by Using Schema Markup
Unlike HTML meta data, schema markup is much more granular and has a variety of different uses. Taking advantage of schema markup to add structure to your data can result in an increase of the search engines’ understanding of the content on your website. It also improves search visibility via rich snippets, featured snippets, and knowledge graph results.
A word of warning: schema markup can be very overwhelming.
This is exactly why many marketers, site owners, and SEO providers tend to avoid using it. Fortunately, with a little practice and some good old trial and error, you can really add a lot of benefit to your site.
According to Schema.org, the word schema is defined as two hierarchies, one for textual property values and another for the things that they help to describe. You can find a list of all the classes schema has been broken into by clicking here. Originally founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex, Schema.org vocabularies are developed and maintained as open community process via the public-schemaorg@w3.org mailing list and through GitHub.
Some of the more commonly used types of Schema include the following:
- Action
- Creative Works like the following: CreativeWork, Book, Movie, MusicRecording, Recipe, TVSeries
- Embedded non-text objects like the following: AudioObject, ImageObject, VideoObject
- Event
- Health/Medical types
- Organization
- Person
- Place such as LocalBusiness and Restaurant
- Product, Offer, AggregateOffer
- Review, AggregateRating
If you can add Schema to your site, you can give Google and other search engines more details on your content. This helps them better understand your intent and match it with more targeted users. This ultimately leads to not just more visibility, but visibility among users who are likely to convert, which is even better!
[irp]
Types of Schema Markups that All Sites Should Be Using
Organization Schema Markup
The organization schema markup helps generate a few things for your business including brand signals that can enhance your website snippet and a Knowledge Graph entry that appears in the search results on the right-hand column. The key points you’ll want to take advantage of here include the following: corporate contact information, logo, and social profile links.
Website Schema Markup
The WebSite schema markup helps to generate the “Sitelinks Search Box” functionality for brand rankings. For this feature to work, you must have an existing site search on your website to enable to Sitelinks Search Box element.
Breadcrumbs Schema Markup
The BreadcrumbList schema markup allows you to mark up the breadcrumbs on your site, which allows you to generate breadcrumb rich snippets for the pages on your website in the search engine results pages.
Site Navigation Schema Markup
The SiteNavigationElement schema markup can help improve a search engine crawlers’ understanding of your site structure and navigation. This can be used to influence organic site links and help improve indexation and the technical SEO element of your website.
Video Schema Markup
Utilizing the VideoObject schema markup is huge right now, especially given the recent trend of content moving towards video consumption more than any other medium as of right now. A site with embedded or hosted video content can leverage the schema markup to help with rich snippets for YouTube videos as well as your Web pages in the Google video search.
Article Schema Markup
If you’re a blogger or if your company website has a blog (which it totally should), then you’ll want to take advantage of this markup for sure. Depending on your site and the content on it, you’ll want to leverage the NewsArticle schema markup or the BlogPosting schema markup. Taking advantage of these markups accordingly can help to improve visibility for your content in Google News and in-depth article suggestions. Things to note specifically would be to properly use: Headline, Image, and DatePublished.
Conclusion
When it comes to search engine optimization, there is more to it than just ranking and driving traffic. It’s all about driving traffic that engages and converts users.To make sure that your site is being placed in front of the right audience, the search engines themselves have to understand everything about your site, it’s content, and the context in which everything is being presented. By leveraging structured data and schema markup, you can better inform the search engine crawlers that are coming to your site about the content that’s on it.
If you are interested in learning more, check out this post on Search Engine Land, about detailed examples of structured data and schema markup with example codes.
