How to Use Schema and Structured Data for Your SEO Strategy
Schema and Structured data are becoming more and more important in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If you have a website and you want to compete in search results and be the one customers selects, then you are in the right place. In this blog you will know what Schema and structured data are and how they help you and your business grow.
What is Structured Data?
While you were searching for a certain product or may be a service you were looking for, you came across search results with pictures. You definitely noticed how they look different from the usual search results that have just a URL, a title and a meta description. These results have the product images you are looking to buy. They also show the price of this product, the rating and reviews on that product. When your eyes notices these amazing images of the product you want to buy or how cool the place is that offers the service you want, you tend to click on that link that will then take you to the business website. These kind of results are called rich results. They different than results that show only the URL, the title and a small description.
There are many types of rich results. Rich results can show images, videos, events, product information, FAQs, articles, job postings, game reviews, how-to and much more.
To get rich results like these, you need to add structured data to your website. Structure data is a piece of code written in a specific format. These codes help search engines and social media platforms to understand what your page is about.
Here is for example a search result for one of our products. You will find, not only the URL, title and meta description, but a image for the product along with a review and its rating. You can also see where that product located on Sabjol Electronics’ website and when it was added to our online shop stock.
The search engines and social media platforms do not understand plain English and visualize images as we do though. That’s why it needs coding. The codes tell these platforms the title of the product, the review on an article, who the author is, how good a game is and what age is best for and so forth.
Basically, structure data is a type codes you add to your page to describe the content of your page. It’s a way to talk to search engines and social media platforms in a language they understand. When you add these codes to the page, users do not see it but machines do. They then show users all kinds of interesting things you posted on your website.
What is Schema.org?
Now that we understand that in order to make search engines and social media platforms understand your page content, you need to add your data structure codes to your page’s coding. For that reason; Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex, have gathered together to come up with Schema.org. There you can find all the structured data markup. Markup literately means coding.
There are different types of structured data coding, the most famous one of them all is JSON-LD. JSON-LD is so famous because that is the type of code that search engines and social media platforms understand best.
Examples of Different Businesses that use Structured Data
Now, if you offer t-shirts on your website, you can show the search engines the colour of your t-shirts, the brand, different sizes, how many you have in stock, how your customers rated it and what reviews they added. Search engines then use this information to show on their search results as shown in the example.
Schema.org is not only for websites that sells products. So if you host events for example, you can still add that plug-in to your page to show search engines what your event is about, when and where it will take place.
If you are a real estate agent or a financial advisor, you can add that plug-in to point out what company you work for, your address, the houses or investment products you are selling.
May be you are a professional coach and you sell books. You can use the markup to point out the author, the ISBN (International Standard Book Number) and the abstract.
If you write blogs, you can tell search engines and social media platforms (e.g. Pinterest) what the blog is about, who the author is and when it was published.
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How does Structured Data help with SEO?
Through out our blog we did give some reasons as of why you should have Structured data markup in your contents. Here we are going to summarize the reason your competitors use Structured Data on their web pages.
1. Structured data makes search engines understand your contents.
It introduces your business to search engines and social media platforms users. If they type in what they are looking for, the search engines and platforms recognizes your business shows you content as one of the options they found for their users.
2. Structured data helps with higher rankings
The more your pages will show on search results, the more clicks you will get from different search engine users. The more visitors you get to your website the higher your site will rank on search engines.
3. Structured data gives rich results
As you’ve seen in the example, Structured data changed the way our search results look like. When you add Structured data, your search results show more information to your users. That makes your search results distinguished and more attractive to click on.
Structured data is getting more and more important in our era. Take a closer look at the big brands, you will find all their products you searched for on any of the search engines show rich results. That means they embedded structure data markups in their contents. They used it to empower attractive ways to present their products and services. If you do not know coding or do not have time to embed these codes in your contents, contact us and we will do it for you. You might still have a very good chance of getting ahead of your competitors.
As we reach the end of our article, you now know what Schema and Structured Data are about and how they are able to help you rank high on search engines. Some shared links are of our affiliates though. While you enjoy the best deals we captured for you we receive a credit to keep our business going.
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