What Is Schema?

Maybe you’ve heard of schema, maybe you haven’t. Schema markup is a set of structured data vocabulary aimed at helping search engines better understand the information on your page. The result is search engines recognize the meaning and relationships behind the content on your page and thereby display rich snippets on SERPs.

In short, schema is a language used to represent structured data. It can organize your page’s content, and it makes the information easier for search engines to crawl and understand.

To give an example of a rich snippet, think of recipe pages. A rich snippet would include a star rating or even the time it takes to make the recipe. It shows information beyond the usual title tag and meta description.

There are three formats of schema markups most popular search engines use:

• JSON-LD
• Microdata
• RDFa

And there are quite a few more categories:

• Organization (displaying company information)
• Person (displays details about an individual)
• Local business
• Product & offer
• Breadcrumbs (shows the path links that commonly lead to the listed page, otherwise known as the site hierarchy)
• Article (common for news articles and blog posts, showing how much time has passed since it was posted)
• Video
• Event (such as information on concerts, lectures, festivals, etc.)
• Recipe (such as nutritional information, reviews, prep/cook/total time)

If you’re not a coding pro, there’s no need to worry. Sites like technicalseo.com offer free tools such as a structured data generator. All you have to do is input the variables, and it does the rest.

Why Rich Results Matter for SEO

A big part of SEO is simply getting users to click on your link (and, of course, enticing them to stay on your page for longer than a few seconds). Rich snippets are just another way to leverage more clicks because they take up more real estate in SERPs. Standard organic search results occupy approximately 90 pixels of vertical height on the screen, whereas a rich snippet gets 250 pixels of vertical space.

With the increase in on-screen real estate, you’ll get a higher click-through rate that can, in turn, improve your rankings.

Optimizing for Rich Snippets

Implementing rich snippets and structured data for your site is considered to be a more advanced strategy for SEO. If you still want to dive into creating rich snippets, here are some steps you can take to get started:

Identify active data types
Search results vary depending on the type of query. To get started, find out what types of rich snippets exist for the queries in your targeted keyword search.

There are SEO tools that you can utilize for checking search results for rich snippets for your keywords.

Develop a semantic markup strategy
Once you’ve discovered what kind of schema markup you need, you want to ensure you can provide all the data for all the pages concerned. Some structured data requires only one update to your site, while other types may need to be dynamically updated, such as products.

Code the structured data
As mentioned above, there are sites you can use that will generate the proper code to input into your site. However, if you’re not the least bit familiar with modifying code on your site, we recommend hiring a developer who can incorporate the proper code into your page.

Sit back and wait for engines to pick up your updates
Once the code is live on your site (and it’s been verified), all you have to do is wait for search engines like Google to recrawl and index your site. There’s no guarantee that the spiders will pick up the new code for display in SERPs, but you can sit back and know you’ve done everything you can to take your SEO game to the next level!

Any Last Questions?

That’s it for our Getting Started with SEO series! If you have any questions or would like a consultation with us, we want to hear from you! At Ghost Brands, we specialize in website design, SEO, production, social media, branding, and more. Ready to give your business strategy a boost?