Guide to Schema Mark Up & It’s SEO Benefits

Ranking a client’s website at the top position, on the first page of Google for industry specific keywords is the primary goal of SEO professionals.

Schema markup is one of the approaches that can give boost to your SEO campaign.

It’s the technical part of SEO and one of the under exploited activity used to improve websites presence in SERP’s.

If done properly it’s definitely worth to spend the time & efforts doing it.

Let’s know more about Schema markup&its implementation.

What is Schema Markup?

As we know search engines don’t read a web page as we humans do. We can easily understand what a web page is about but search engines needs extra information to know the context of a webpage.

History of schema mark-up.

Schema markup found at schema.org is a form of microdata for which top search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yandex etc. collaborated in the year 2011 with a common goal to create a structured data markup that all search engines can understand.

In the age of knowledge graph & hummingbird, schemamarkup has become very important. It helps search engines to easily understand about the web page and different elements that the page contains, it provides context to the web page.

Visit the official website of schema schema.org.

From Dublin to Schema the journey of Meta Data

Dublin core metadata was quite popular prior to schema.org . It was named on the location of the OCLC/NCSA Metadata Workshop which was held in Dublin, Ohio in the year 1995.

It was quite popularly used for on-page optimization & honored by Google because of its endorsements such as IETF, RFC, ISO and NISO Standard.

Schema.org gained popularity & became the preferred metadata choice for SEO because it was created by the major search engines of the world in the year 2011.

Currently Dublin core is still used in document heavy fields like libraries, law & universities.
Different Markup Format for Structured Data Implementation

JSON-LD, Microdata&RDFa are the three most popular schema markup formats supported by popular search engines.

In simple words, RDFa&Microdata are inline markup syntaxes. It means you will have to add Schema information directly in the HTML code of the website if you are using these formats.

Schema markup using JSON-LD can be implemented through javascript code or embedded widgets in your content management system. It can be placed in the head or body section of the web page. You don’t have to make changes in the html of your page; it’s a hidden script that the search engines read.

Even the Big G(Google) recommends using JSON-LD where ever possible.

Please check the recent Google developer article on Structured Date(Link to https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/intro-structured-data#markup-formats-and-placement).

Watch the video to know more about JSON-LD

Commonly used Schema Markup types:

•  Local Business
• Organization
• Person
• Review
• Creative works
• Event
• Health and medical types
• Product

Structured Data Markup Testing Tools

Once you implement the mark up in your website now it’s time to test it.

Here are few tools where you can test your structured data markup.

Google Structured Data Testing Tool
This tool is provided by Google, you can test the webpages where you have implemented the schema markup with this tool. It will help you with the preview, errors & warnings. This tool is also available in the Google Webmaster Tools.
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

JSON LD Playground
This tool uses the jasonld.js JSON-LD processor; it displays the output of the code & also highlights the error if any in the code.
https://json-ld.org/playground/

RDFa
This tool is an extension to HTML5 which helps to markup things like People, Reviews, Events, Recipes and Places.
http://rdfa.info/play/

Merkel SEO

This is an interesting tool which will generate structured data in JSONLD and Microdata formats. You will have to select the type from the drop down menu which has the basic options. Fill the information in the textboxes andit will automatically display the code with your provided information. It also has an option to validate your code directly in Google structured data testing tool.
https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/schema-markup-generator/

Benefits of using Schema Markup:

1. It helps search engine understand about the business and what it offers. Example: It explains that you deal in Apple Laptops and not the Apple Fruit.
2. It provides rich snippets like reviews, photos, breadcrumb etc. in the search engine results page which increases click through rate. As it’s tested & known that CTR do improve rankings.
3. You can also display your business details like logo, social media accounts, contact numbers etc. in the search engines results page.
4. Local business can inform search engines about their GEO location and other information through schema markup which helps in Local SEO.

How to Add Schema Markup in Website/Blog

I will explain the two methods which I use to add schema markup in the website.

1) Plugins: If you are using wordpress, as its one of the most popular CMS platform used in the world, you can use a plugin to add schema markup to your website.

Here is an article which will help you to know more about different plugins.
https://www.joomdev.com/blog/entry/best-schema-wordpress-plugins

2) Manual: This is another method but it’s recommended if you have coding skills or have a skilled website developer in your team who can help you with this.

It has an added advantage, as the plugins provides somewhat limited features, with this method you can do detailed mark up for your website.

With the help of my website developer, I create a section in thewordpress website which gives an option to paste the schema markup for every page & blog of the website.

Apart from wordpress, if you are having a website in Php or Html you can paste the schema code directly in thesection of the page.

I have implemented schema mark with both the above methods and it works perfectly.

Google’s guidelines for using structured data

If you are optimizing your website for Google than it’s important to play by their rules.There are certain guidelines by Google that they want webmasters to follow while adding structured data to their website.
Please consider that we are using schema markup so that search engine displays the content in a better way to people. If you help out the search engines, they will help you in return.
Screen shot of the markup

Conclusion

Schema markup should be a part of your On page SEO activity. People often tend to ignore the technical part of SEO.
I recommend adding schema mark up in your website as I implement it on every websites which I optimize.