What is Schema Markup? Understand How Structured Data Works?

When it comes to search engine optimization, schema markup can help your website get more clicks from visibility by driving more traffic. We’ll discuss schema markup basics in this article, as well as why it’s important for search engine optimization.

What is schema markup? 

You can add schema markup to the HTML of your website (also known as semantic vocabulary or microdata). This microdata helps search engines better understand your content to return more detailed and informative results for searchers.

When schema markup is added to your website, it creates a rich snippet that appears on the search engine results page (SERP). Rich snippets will be discussed in more detail in a later section.

The structure.org website collaborates with a variety of search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo.

How does schema markup structured data work?

By using structured data, you make it easier to index and categorize your content by matching names and values. Microdata is structured data that is used with HTML5, the most widely used primary markup language. The schema.org markup language offers a set of widely accepted definitions for microdata tags.

Adding schema markup to these categories is most common for adding information about values:

• Creative work
• Event
• Medical entity
• Organization
• Person
• Place

How does schema markup impact SEO?

Using schema markup, Google can easily understand the content of your webpage. Consequently, your webpage gets a rich snippet and becomes an entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph.

Rich snippets 

Rich snippets are Google search results that display extra information between the URL and the Meta description. Rich snippets are often found in recipes, reviews, and events.

A rich snippet includes the recipe rating, cook time, and a photo of the finished dish.

Structured data in page’s HTML is often used to create rich snippets of information. When you add structured data with schema markup, Google may display rich snippets when your webpage appears in search results.

Rich snippets are more appealing and exciting than typical search results, so giving Google the information it needs to create a rich snippet can drive visibility for your site and organic clicks.

Knowledge Graph

As well as schema markup being one of the major sources of information for the Google Knowledge Graph, a knowledge base of entities and relationships, schema markup also feeds into other Google products.

The Knowledge Graph helps Google better understand users’ search queries, which allows them to provide more relevant results.

You can get a knowledge panel when people are looking for a specific brand on Google’s Knowledge Graph by including your brand.

The knowledge panel is described by Google as a box that appears on the search results page when you search for entities in the Knowledge Graph (people, companies, organizations, things). Rather than providing detailed information on a topic, they’re simply meant to give you a quick snapshot of what’s available on the web-based on Google’s understanding.

How to implement schema markup

Schema markup can be daunting to many SEOs because it’s so code-heavy, but there’s no need to be concerned. It’s prednisone 10mg buy online relatively simple to understand once you’ve mastered the basics.

Let’s see how to implement schema markup on your website:

Generate the markup

It is entirely possible to write schema markup yourself, but it isn’t always necessary. WordPress comes with a number of plugins that make life easier. If not, there are countless markup generators. The one from Merkle and the Schema Builder extension are my favorites, but there are many options. You should keep in mind that these generators usually cover only basic markup. In order to go beyond that, you will need to change the code yourself.

Code examples here are all in JSON-LD format, which is recommended by Google. Additionally, it is the easiest to implement and understand.

It is still common to encounter another format called Microdata because many CMS and plugins employ it. RDFa is the only other accepted format for HTML5, but I have not had any experience with it.

Test your code first

Unless you’re using a CMS or plugin to interact via a user interface, you should always test your markup before pushing it to production. A couple of Google’s easy-to-use tools are available for performing these tests.

Deploy the code on your website

The way you complete this step will depend on the type of website you have and your tagging system. It is recommended to use JSON-LD for schema formatting here, as I already mentioned.

We’ll go through these three implementation methods:

Straight into the HTML

A JSON-LD schema is formatted as a script that is placed in the *head> section

Or<body> of your HTML.

The webmaster should speak to the developers and agree that they should be assigned this task. There are likely to be mappings between URLs and categories, along with highlights of dynamic and static values (think about brand versus price in product schemas).

Using Google Tag Manager

Until recently, deploying schema markup through GTM wasn’t a great option since Googlebot needs to render JavaScript to access it. Nevertheless, Google recently made GTM implementation one of the officially approved options.

Marketing professionals who are comfortable with GTM will particularly benefit from this. Using this methodology, companies whose development teams have a hard time implementing SEO changes have an excellent workaround.

It is only recommended if you already have a marketing technology stack managed by GTM. You can set up the trigger based on a page view to a specific page or pages by pasting the schema created as a custom HTML tag.

Using a CMS and plugins

Schema mark-up is implemented in this way because it is the most common and beginner-friendly way. It can, however, also be the most confusing due to the variety of CMS and plugins.

There is no CMS or plugin that does all the work for you. It is inevitable that you will have to combine available options if you require advanced schema mark-up. Injecting code directly on a page or via GTM can also be involved with adjusting your themes and templates.