How to optimize website SEO with Schema Markup – A complete guide

Searching for different ways to make your website visible in search engines? Have you heard about the latest evolution in SEO – the terms like Schema.org, Schema Markup, or Structured Data? These are the innovative methods of SEO available today. A few years back marketers were more concerned about saturating their content with keywords. There was a lot of off-page SEO slowly turning spammy which resulted in disavowing of many of the off-site ranking factors. Grasping these new concepts and methods of Schema markup can help in boosting your website in the search engine result pages. (SERPs).

What is Schema Markup?

Search engines need to understand the content of the page and they work hard for this. That’s where Schema Markup comes into play. 

Schema is an advanced vocabulary for structured data, developed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and Yandex with the aim of developing structured data vocabulary that search engines can comprehend. It is a particular vocabulary of microdata that can be added to HTML to enhance the representation of a page in SERPs.

In simple words, Schema markup is a code (semantic vocabulary). If you put it on your website it will help the search engines return more informative results for users. Schema markup creates a detailed description termed as rich snippets when it is applied to the website. It includes reviews, ratings, prices, and any information which you want to highlight. It’s simple yet can turn to be the best companion to your SEO methods helping you to optimize your website to rank high on search engines. Schema markup helps to add the background context to the content. By adding it to the specific parts of your website search engine recognizes what your content is all about.

The first example contains rich snippets- the stars in the search listing which draws the human eye and increases the click-through rate. Both these are added through schema. 

The second search result does not have rich snippets and displays the meta description chosen by Google. 

Advantages of Rich Snippets:

• Get readers attention by offering a unique look 
• Helpful navigation items and extra information to help readers determine that your website will give them what they’re looking for.

Schema.org explains it this way: 

 “Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means — “Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user”.

Beneficial for users 

If your website has a schema markup your users can see in SERPs what your website is all about, where they are, what they do, how much is the cost, and more. Schema markup actually acts as your virtual business card. 

Importance of Schema  

·        Review – Very useful if you review products, movies, books, music or something else on your site.

·        Local Business – If you run a local business, this markup can give you a nice boost in local search results.

·        Article/Blog Post – Ideal for blogs and news sites to help improve the appearance of posts.

·        Service – If you are a service provider, this schema may help Google show extra information about it.

·        Software Application – Show enhanced search results for your software applications

·        Product – This lets you add detailed information for any products you offer.

·        Course – This schema adds extra data for online or in-person courses.

·        Event – Add structured data to your events to make them pop in search results.

·        Recipe – Show your cooking recipes as rich snippets in search results.

·        Person – Display specific information about a person with this schema.

·        Job Postings – This would work great for job boards or if you have job openings at your company.

·        Book – Make books on your site stand out in Google SERPs.

·        Video Object – Add schema markup to video content.

Get the entire list here: https://schema.org/docs/full.html. Let your website data be any type, your SEO will have a great benefit with Schema Markup.

Google’s Knowledge Graph

The large block which appears to the right of Google’s organic results is known as Google’s Knowledge Graph. Using structured data on your website will help in influencing the information in the knowledge graph result and gives you a more complete listing. 

How will Schema improve your SEO?

Help search engine crawlers to interpret the content on your website pages just by including schema microdata in your HTML code. This is the best way to increase your visibility. This is not at all the quick and dirty SEO hack, instead schema is a best practice that makes it easier for search engines to display your content. If you are running your personal blog site you can tell search engines that the site represents a person. With Schema you can also link your site to the social media accounts. Schema markup can also be used to tell the search engines where your website is based or where the organization it represents is based.

A brief overview of how to use Schema markup on your website:

1. Go to Google Structured Data Markup Helper. Among different options listed select the type of data, you plan to markup. I am using articles, one of the most common types of content

 2. Give the URL of the page or article that you want to markup.

  3. The page will load in the markup tool and you can start tagging now.

 4. Add your Markup items 

 5. Then click on create HTML at the top right side. You will see the HTML of your page with the relevant microdata inserted in the spots that you selected.

6. Click finish and you will get 

7. Use the structured data testing tool and find out what your page will look like with the added markups. 

The more you markup, the better.

Millions of websites are missing out on a huge source of SEO potential. Using schema markup will automatically help you have a leg up on the majority of your competition.