Schema Optimization
What most of your competitors are missing out on is the benefit of structured data. This is easily said to be the future of technical SEO. Through schema optimization, you can quickly identify each data markup on your site, which can help you gain higher ranks.
Schema markup is a sort of microdata that, when added to a web page, creates an enhanced form of description that appears in one’s search results. This enhanced description is known as a rich snippet.
How any search engine interprets the context of the searched query will determine the quality of search results. So it means that scheme optimization kind of tells the search engines what your data means instead of simply what it “states.”
The content on your website gets indexed and then returned in the search results. With the use of schema optimization, some of the results are indexed and then returned in a different way. It is a sort of code that you put up on your websites so that the search engines return more informative results to their users. This will be really easy for you to understand if you have used rich snippets.
Schema optimization assists your website in ranking better in all sorts of content, including:
- Products
- Articles
- Software Applications
- Restaurants
- Movies
- Book Reviews
- Local Businesses
- Tv Episodes & Ratings
- Events
Websites that will be using schema optimization will rank much better in the SERPs when compared to websites that do not use schema optimization.
It all started a while back in 2011 when Google, Yahoo, Bing & Yandex all came together to create the schema markup. Their main goal was to help the users get more accurate results as the search engine would understand them more clearer.
So what is the difference between structured data and schema markup? Structured data refers to any sort of HTML code that tells the search engine about what the page contains, while schema markup refers to structured data with classes & values that are standardized.
Why is it so important?
The answer can be explained by saying that it sort of improves the crawlers’ ability to read your website. It informs the search engines about what’s on your page. This proves really useful for local companies that need to clarify certain information like what they are selling or what their contact number is. Another reason why it is important is that it helps in improving the visibility on the search engine pages. With the markup, more information is added to the results, which makes them more attractive to the users, so it results in more engagement. It helps in boosting your SEO indirectly as the users prefer a well-formatted result. Also, keep in mind that more clicks lead to better and higher rankings. Also, with more information available to them, the customers can make better and more informed results which leads to more qualified traffic.
When one uses scheme optimization, it results in the search engines in understanding your website more accurately, which, in then, results in increasing the:
Content Recognition – It helps in assisting your website in becoming more engaging and informative, which is a really essential thing in the SEO game.
Brand Awareness – If you want your brand to be visible in the results on search engines, then formatting your content is a great way to do it. Another added advantage is that when the users see your brand appear in a well-formatted rich snippet, it result in more trust being generated.
Local Business Details – Structured data can help search engines understand how to display information like your address and contact information, especially if your brand is a local one.
Event Promotion – You can use schema optimization to promote events. The local users can become aware of your events when they search for tags like “events near me.”
Visibility – You can also display the brand’s logo or the CEO’s message and other such related details of your business.
There are many ways to use schema optimization. These include microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD. Google is supportive of all of these, but it prefers JSON-LD.
Each class of data uses different properties on the different types of items. Like if you are selling books, then you can easily add the author’s name and the book title, etc.