What is Schema Markup in SEO and Are You Using it on Your Website Yet?

Schema Markup is one of the latest and most powerful evolutions in SEO right now. It's a very new optimization method that is also one of the least used methods, mainly because many people still don't know what it is, and how it can even be useful for your website. But with Schema Markup you can use it to boost your websites ranking in the SERPs and also attract more visitors to your site. Here I will try to explain a little about what Schema Markup is, how search engines use it and how it can be useful for your site as an SEO optimization method.

So What is Schema Markup?

If you've ever used rich snippets before then you'll be able to relate to schema markup off the bat. Schema markup is a semantic vocabulary that you can use on your site in its HTML to help the search engines show much more informative results for its searchers. The image below is a typical example of schema markup in use on concert ticket website's events page. As you can see, it shows the latest events in a listed format underneath your sites title and meta description that's used by Google.

The schema markup has told the search engine to show a list of scheduled events that the concert ticket site is holding which for the user can be extremely useful in finding what they're looking for much much faster. So schema markup tells them not just what it says but what it actually means. Of course, your websites content is crawled and indexed by a search engine and it then shows this in search results depending on what the searcher searched for. But by using schema markup the content will get indexed and shown in a much better way.

How and why?

The schema markup tells Google what the content actually means not just what it says. For instance, imagine I'm using the word "Ideal Mike" on this page. Google will see this and then create its own SERP entry for the words "Ideal Mike". But if I use schema markup around the words "Ideal Mike" it would tell Google that the word Ideal Mike is not just a word but is the name of the author of this page or article. So Google can then give better results to the searcher of those words.

Schema.org puts it like this;

Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, <h1>Avatar</h1> tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means — “Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.

By the way: the schema.org website for schema markup was created by a collaborative team from Google, Bing, and Yahoo all working together which sounds absurd seeing as they are all rival competitors but their objective was to create an agreed-upon set of code markers that tell the major search engines what to do with the data on your site. When websites use schema markup on them, people can see what a site is all about as well as things like where they are, what they do and how much things cost stuff like that which helps a user make quicker, more accurate decisions about which site to visit in the SERP results pages. In fact, schema markup has been dubbed and coined it your "virtual business card". A search engines main purpose is to provide its users with what they're looking for and this markup basically improves user focus and engagement on your site.

So why is Schema Markup so important for your SEO?

Websites that make good use of schema markup will rank better in the SERPs than websites without it! Schema markup can help your site rank higher for all sorts of content. Such as; articles, local businesses, restaurants, TV episodes, book reviews, movies, software apps, events, products and much much more. Basically, it can be used with any type of website data which can have an itemscope or itemtype associated with it where using schema markup would benefit from that.

How to use Schema Markup?

You wont have to learn any new coding skills to use schema markup and webpages with schema markup in them will still be HTML. All you're doing is adding schema markup to the HTML much in the same way as you would add OG tags or any other meta information to it in the header of it.

If you go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper here, https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/ you can select the type of data that you'd like to create schema markup code for. You can create schema markup for any page on your site, generate it and then add it into your HTML code of those pages.

That's basically it but there are some additional steps you can take and some extra things you can do. You should check out the Google About Structured Data Markup Helper page which will walk you through more about what schema markup is, how it works, how to use it and basically everything else you need to know about it.

So yeah, schema markup, it can help your site to rank higher by using it. One case study determined that sites that use schema markup rank four positions higher on average compared to sites that don't use it. It provides your sites visitors and users with a better experience which is what Google is all about doing so that's probably why it helps as well.

What do you think about schema markup?

Are you using it on your site yet? If not, you could be loosing out..

Discuss...