What is Schema SEO? | How Schema Markup Helps with SEO
A schema tag is the specific language that is used to help search engines read and index your website for search engine results pages (SERPs). Mathematicians and computer scientists are concerned with the meaning of programming languages and studying programming language theory. Semantics is the study of the meaning of language. In computer science, semantics is used to describe how a computer follows a series of commands to execute a program in a specific language.
In simpler terms, a schematic is a programming language or code that web developers use in creating your website in order to help search engines return more relevant and informative results for users. These schemas allow web crawlers to make sense of what’s on your website, and the quality of your content. Google needs to make important decisions about whether or not to trust your website based on the information on it. By inserting specific keywords, you optimize your website for schema SEO.
Backstory
Schema.org is an initiative by Bing, Google, and Yahoo! that launched in June 2011. At the time those three companies were the largest search engines in the world. Their goal was to create and support a shared set of schemas for structured data markup on websites.
What is structured data?
Google wants to understand what the content is on a web page. Through structured data, you can tell Google exactly what the meaning of a web page is. Structured data includes information that can be easily categorized, such as names, dates, addresses, credit card numbers and geolocations. Schema markups are types of code that make it easier for web crawlers to understand this structured data, organize it, and display it on SERPs.
An example can illustrate how this can benefit your business. If you own an outdoor recreational gear company, then you can write your code so that structured data labels each individual element listed in a blog post on how to set up a tent. This way users can find your website whether they type in “how to build a tent”, “ build a tent frame” or “nylon camping tent.” Basically, by using schemas your users can find you through a variety of ways because of the different elements of structured data are used to trigger web crawlers. It essentially helps you cast a bigger net, but without losing the quality of your leads.
When you choose the right keywords to incorporate into your product listings and other content, your sales pages show up when users are conducting searches. But structured data is not exactly the same as schemas. Structured data includes the words themselves, the actual content that helps a search engine to index your website. Schema.org is a collective agreement of best practices.
What are rich snippets?
Rich snippets, also known as rich results, are search results that are displayed with extra data to give the user a little bit more information on what the website is about. It’s the structured data markup that our team at On The Map Marketing can add to your HTML code so that Bing, Yahoo!, or Google are clear on what information you have on your website.
Structured Data
There has been some contention as to whether or not structured data really does affect rankings, and some people have even experimented with trying to disprove that they do. Google keeps a very tight lid on their practices and what exactly they used to determine how a website ranks on SERPs. Plus, they use over 200 factors to evaluate websites, so it’s not very easy to figure out what they are thinking and using as a rubric.
One of the ways that we solve this issue is by experimenting with different methods until we find which one is driving up traffic to your website, and ultimately driving up sales.
Search Engine Optimization
Back in the early days of online shopping, affiliate marketers sold anything they wanted, without having to be an expert on the product or its niche. But search engines wanted to vet sellers and websites so that those with broken links or untrustworthy owners wouldn’t show up in their SERPs. What this also created was an opportunity to use keywords and high standards to make Google notice a web page and rank it higher. Using authoritative backlinks, engaging content, and schema SEO, you can help improve your business’ ranking on search engines and drive up sales.
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