Schema markup is the latest development in SEO, a common language developed and recognized by some of the world’s largest search engines, including Google. Schema markup is essentially an invisible labeling process that describes your data better, so searchers can find more relevant results.
Here at Informatics, the name of our company is also the name of a science. You, a person on the internet looking for Informatics in Iowa, might get results for both an outstanding digital agency (that’s us), and results for the Informatics program at the University of Iowa. Schema markup would help search engines identify one result that is a business, and one that’s a college degree program, guiding the searcher to the most relevant result.
Another simple way of thinking about it: when a search engine crawls your HTML, the search engine discovers WHAT is there. When that HTML includes schema markup, the search engine understands WHY it’s there.
Everybody’s Doing It
This incredibly powerful set of context clues was developed collaboratively by teams at Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex. That means the work you and your team do to include schema markup in your code will be effective for over 96% of worldwide searches.
I Wanna Be Rich
Schema markup is a little different from your other HTML tags. For instance, inserting the tag h1 in your website’s code will make the next piece of text appear in a “Heading 1” format for visitors to your site. When you tag a section of your code with schema markup, the appearance of your site doesn't change for visitors. But let’s take a step back to the moments before a visitor arrived, back to when they found you via a search engine results page. Your website will show up with a title, and under that title will be additional text that is known as a “rich snippet.”
The rich snippet defaults to the page’s meta-description, or sometimes populates with other information selected by Google. When you use schema markup, you can help search engines to display products, articles, showtimes, events, reviews, recipes and hundreds of other specifications.
Next Big Thing
Just like a traditional SEO campaign that target a mix of both broad and specific keywords in an attempt to cast the best net for capturing traffic, a schema strategy depends on the informed selection of relevant labels, or tags. Those labels, determined collaboratively by schema.org, are all available on the association’s website. According to Search Engine Watch, “even the highest estimate of Schema.org adoption still comes in at less than a third of websites.” Now is the time to set yourself apart from your competitors by utilizing schema markup, an SEO tactic that is poised to remain useful long into the future.
Win the battle now and keep up your results with maintenance, and you can become an SEO powerhouse, forcing your competitors to play catch-up. The SEO experts at Informatics are uniquely equipped to imagine, implement, and maintain a strategy that keeps you in front of internet audiences. Get started today!
