Editorial Staff
Schema markup (also called as schema or structured data) is one of the important skillset of technical SEO in order to make your website stand out from the competitors.
With schema markup, the search engine will have better understanding about your site in order to provide to their users, as well improving the crawlability.
According to research, only around 30% of websites are using schema markup on their pages.
This is why, if you master it, you can have additional benefits over your competitor!
In this module, you’re going to learn about more about what is schema markup in SEO and how you can implement them on your site.
What is Schema?
Schema is the dictionary for the search engine.
With schema added into a site, it helps the search engine to figure out what every piece of content means.
When the search engine crawl a page, the bots are looking on the page heading, keywords, and content before finally decide what is your page about.
However, sometimes the machine learning still get caught up with some semantic words.
For example, when you’re writing article about Apple, it is hard for the search engine to understand whether you’re writing about the fruit “apple”, or the company “Apple”.
This is where schema does it job, eliminating the doubt so that the search engine clearly know what is your page about.
Not only semantic words example above, sometimes understanding a page could be troubled by the website’s own unique vocabulary.
Benefits of Schema Markup in SEO
With the above examples, these are why using schema markup is important:
1. Improve Crawlability
With this schema, not only it will help the search engine bot to crawl better, but it helps them to understand what they’re reading.
2. Boost Ranking
Google uses the schema markup on your page to create rich snippets such as rating and sitelinks.
With this rich snippets displayed on your organic search result, it become more attractive, visible, and engaging to the users.
While the page with schema are more likely to be clicked than those without, the higher the ranking a website will get.
Adding schema markup does not guarantee that your listing or rich snippets will show in search result, but it will ensure the search engine understand your page properly to be shown to the relevant audience.
How to Use Schema Markup?
If you’re using WordPress, you can plugin like Yoast to help add the schema markup on your site.
Otherwise, follow the steps below:
1. Test Your Site
You might first want to test your site using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Testing your site giving you an idea of what kind of markup is beneficial to add, point up errors in schema markup, and identify if your site already has existing schema.
2. Generate Schema Markup
Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a useful tool that will help code your schema markup for you.
Now, we’ll show you an example on how to do it with a website.
First, enter your page URL that you want to generate the markup.
Then, identify what type of content is on the page. In this case, it’s product since it is a product page.
Once you have that, select “Start Tagging.”
Afterwards, you’ll need to start tagging by highlighting the attributes on the page.
In this case:
- “Panasonic 330W Module BLK/WHT” is highlighted and tagged as the product name
- $297 is highlighted and tagged under the Offer > Price
Now, click “create HTML” on the top right.
The tool will automatically highlight some portions of schema markup to be added in your page HTML.
Now that you have your schema markup set up!
