How Schema Markup Can Help You Improve SEO

For many website owners, including schema microdata is a lot like eating healthily and working out – you know you really should do it, but actually getting it done is a lot harder than it sounds. Although schema and other formats of structured markup have been around for years, many sites fail to incorporate it, and even fewer people know much about it. If you’re wondering what schema markup is and how it can help you to improve SEO, don’t worry – we’ve got the answers.

What is Schema and Schema.org?

Schema is a type of microdata that allows search engines such as Google and Bing to parse and interpret the information included on your website. This provides users with more relevant results based on search queries. Schema.org is the centralised home on the web for the Schema project, which is a collaboration between a number of search engines – Google, Bing, Yahoo!, – in order to standardise structured markup. From a users perspective, visually this will make your website stand out from the rest and this will encourage much more traffic to your website!

How Does Schema Work?

Schema microdata is much like a number of other markup formats in that it is incorporated into a website’s content as a way of defining exactly what it is and how it should be treated. Schema elements and attributes are able to be directly added to the HTML coding of a page in order to provide the search engines’ crawlers with even more information regarding your website or webpage.

For example, the first search result below contains both a star rating and a publication date. Both of these can be added using Schema.

Other benefits to using Schema microdata on your website are:

• Eye catching results
• Quality & accurate results
• A lower bounce rate

How Does this Improve SEO?

Since including schema microdata in the HTML coding of your website provides more information for search engines’ crawlers, the result is that they are better able to interpret the content of your pages. For example, search engines can often find it difficult to interpret times and dates correctly, so including schema microdata on your site if there are times and dates to be interpreted can improve your search engine visibility and help search engines to render more relevant results to the user. It’s important to note, however, that at this point schema microdata does not improve search rankings – but it’s an effective tool for helping your site to appear more prominently in SERPs (Search engine results pages).

Because of this, it’s a good idea that more people start using schema microdata on their websites. Regular use of schema microdata is something that can really benefit you when it comes to SEO.

For more information about Schema markup and how it could improve your websites SEO results, please give our team a call today!