What Is Schema?
Schema.org (or “Schema”) is a community website that hosts microdata or tags that you can add to your website’s HTML in order to help search engines read your content and showcase the page in the search results.
Schema.org came about as a collaboration between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to help webmasters and developers “mark up” their websites to get them more easily read by search engines.
How is Schema Used?
The mission of Schema.org is to be a collaborative community that creates and promotes schemas for structured data across the web. These schemas (or “vocabularies”) can be used with different encodings, including RDFa, Microdata and JSON-LD.
Essentially, webmasters can use schema on a website to help search engines better understand the content on the site and display this content in an optimized format in the search results.
If you have seen “rich snippets” in the search results that display, say, a 5-star rating for a business or a preview of a recipe, these are usually examples of rich snippets in action.
Different Items Described by Schema
Structured data is used to mark up a full hierarchy of features and items on a website. The most common items that are marked up by schema include:
- Recipes
- Events
- Organizations
- People
- Places
- Articles
- Books
- Reviews
- Products
Schema can be used to provide more information about a given item. For example, a book can have property names for “author”, “name” (title), “publication date”, “illustrator”, and more. This information can then be displayed in the search results, which provides a better search experience to users.
Why is Schema Important for SEO?
Schema helps search engines better understand your content and create the best search results possible to drive clicks to your website. By adding schema markup to your website, you can improve how a web page is displayed in the search results and therefore entice users to visit your site.
When you add schema markup to your HTML, you enhance the rich snippets that are displayed under your page title, and this can significantly increase your clickthrough rate. And since the goal of SEO is not just to climb rankings but also to drive traffic, you’ll certainly want to do everything you can to get more clicks.
Use Schema on Your Website
It’s recommended that website owners use schema in order to improve how their web pages are displayed in the search results. But, schema can be a rather advanced concept to master – especially if you have limited coding skills.
Work with a trusted web development company to mark up your website effectively and drive more clicks to your website. At Hennessey Digital, we test different types of schema markup to see how your unique audience responds to the rich snippets in the search results.