How Schema Markup SEO Benefits Your Site

Hello all you wonderful SEOers out there! Welcome to Search Engine Academy‘s blog on keyword research, information architecture, internet marketing, and more.

While we teach a lot about organic SEO, we also pay close attention to those processes and techniques that support anyone’s organic SEO efforts to rank their web site higher.

One fairly new process–it’s been around for a little over a year now–is schema.org. What is schema.org, you say? Let’s answer that question and show you why it’s important for your SEO efforts.

Schema.org is data that is “on page markup.” Basically it’s HTML structured data that you can use for a wide variety of things to publish better information about things related to your website and business. Schema.org helps search engines better understand your site. By using schema.org markup, you are improving or enhancing rich snippets for your web pages.

Google supports schema.org using microdata. Now that you know this, you understand it’ll help you in their SERPs, right? Right!

How Google Responds to Schema.org Data

So what exactly is this data? It can be places, people, things, and events, plus a whole lot more. The schema.org website has a humongous list for you to consider. Let’s consider just a few:

Within these designations, there is code you put in your web page’s source code that shows up when you publish the page so your web visitor can see it. This microdata can also show up in the SERPs.

For example, movie showtimes:

The sky’s the limit! I encourage you to head on over to the website and browse the different ways you can use schema.org code to show better information about your site to both web searchers and the engines themselves.

Google Webmaster Central has a nice article introducing you to schema.org. Actually they are doing schema.org as a joint effort with Yahoo and Bing, so the nice thing is you don’t have make a choice between which format to use. For once in their lives, the Big Three Search Engines decided to make it easy on us and accept the same format, yay!

The Schema website is full of great information. It’s very plain and stripped-down looking, but it has everything you need to know to start using schema.org in your website. Are you ready to get started? Surf on over and begin reading how to do the code.

Here’s what I really enjoy about schema.org–it has a huge repository of  shared vocabularies that is understood by the big three search engines. This ties in very nicely with your information architecture (IA) efforts, which complements and supports your SEO efforts. See…everything works together in the end!

What does schema.org look like, anyways? What exactly is this microdata? Let’s say you run a site where you review games. You can boost your game in the SERPs by using schema.org. Take a look at this example from the website:

See what it’s about now? Sure you do!

So as you ponder ways to apply ongoing SEO to your site, think really hard about learning schema.org. It’s not tough. You get all coding from the site itself. By the way, be sure you use the Google rich snippets testing tool to make sure it’s all copasetic. Just remember, red is bad.

Until next time, please keep it between the ditches, umkay?

All the best to you,