Search Engine Optimization with Schema Markup

 

        Schema markup is a piece of code (semantic vocabulary); you add to your website that helps search engines deliver more relevant results to users. This will automatically place your website in a much better position than other websites without schema.

      When you are going through several websites on SERP, there is a high possibility that you click on the one with rich snippets like star rating, publishing date, author name(if it is an article) etc. Well, this is exactly what you can do with a schema mark-up. Several search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo will collaborate to create schema.org to provide the finest search result available by interpreting your site's content. By optimizing the rich snippets that appear beneath the page title, adding Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs.

    There are several examples for rich snippets and various forms of markup like microdata, microformat & RDFa as well as other categories supported by Google that enables you to inspect markup information.

A few examples of data markup are,

·        Article

·        Business

·        Restaurant/Hotel

·        Events

·        TV shows & Reviews

·        Films

·        Job postings

·        FAQ

How to Optimize Your Website with Schema Markup

    Structured Data Markup Helper is a tool used to add structured data markup to a web page so that Google can decode the details on the website. When Google has a clearer understanding of your page info, it can be displayed in Google Search in more appealing and creative ways. This automatically results in boosting natural traffic and places your website higher in SERP.

To optimize your website with schema markup, make sure you follow these steps

1 – Open Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper

When opening Google Structured Data Markup Helper, you will be directed to a page with several data types to perform SEO either in Webpage or Email as your indent.

2 – Select a Data type

From the given option, select the most appropriate data type for your web page. You may choose multiple items for a single page as long as it is of the same data type.

3 – Enter the URL

Enter the web page’s URL. Always make sure that anyone can access/inspect the webpage without logging in. Then, click on Start Tagging.

Now the loaded page will have your webpage on the left pane and right pane with Data items. Beneath the Data item, you can add details that are not visible on the webpage by selecting Add Missing tags.

4 – Markup selected items

Highlight the items on the webpage in the left pane and select the data type (Name, location, start date etc.) in the tooltip. Now the data type is added to the tooltip in the left pane. Continue this procedure until you add every item to the list.

5 – Create HTML

Click on Create HTML when you are done with tagging. Now you will be shown an HTML of the webpage with appropriate microdata placed in the positions you specified.

6 – Adding Schema markup to your site

Go into your CMS or Source Code and paste the highlighted snippets where they belong. The yellow marker in the scrollbar will guide you to the schema markup file. Or simply, download HTML code and copy/paste it into the source code. After successfully editing the source code, click Finish.  And continue with the pop-up window titled next step.

7 – Test your Schema markup

To see how your page would appear with the added markup, use the Structured Data Testing Tool. This testing tool will alert you to any missing fields that you must fill in to help Google understand your website, as well as provide a preview of how your page could appear in Google Search Results for certain data types.

 

Click to know more about SEO