As the world of digital space has taken a huge turn for the best and in the process, evolved; so has the executions and operating procedures. It is one the most powerful features that could give your website the much needed accolades to boom and sit amongst the top of the field. Implementing proper schema markup practices is probably the best thing you can do for your website’s reliance. Schema is a cohesion of semantic vocabulary tags that you can include in your website’s HTML code. This can change the way search engines crawl your web space and help your business to stand out from your competition. If having an upper hand on your competitors and a higher ranking spot in search engine result pages (SERPs) excite you, then we have an even better insight to share. Despite the promising results and several added benefits of schema markup, it is still under utilized and the knowledge associated with it seems to be up in the air; even in this day and age. Which makes schema a green light for your business to take over in your industry.

To help you obtain a first hand knowledge about schema markup and to help you get started with the practice altogether, we have prepared a comprehensive guide for you and your business. Not only this article will help you warm up around the concept but also make you fluent within the practice.

Introduction to Schema Markup

You can label schema markup as a form of structured data or microdata. You can also think about it as a simple code that you add in your website’s HTML which inturn displays more information on those specified keywords in SERPs. This makes your search engine appearance more interactive while cloaking your brand as more responsive and credible. You can drive significantly more organic traffic on your website by this simple and easy trick up your sleeve.

Still not sure whether schema markup is worth your time, effort and money? Let us help you visualize it in a way the experts do.

Schema Directly Dictates to Search Engines

We know how search engines and their bots work. Crawlers index the content on your web pages and present them in the search results. When it comes to schema, the process is just loosely altered.The particulars related to the information that is indexed and churned for search results is different and, a lot better from the user’s standpoint. Regular indexing tells search engines the type of data a set of letters is and presents them according to relevancy in the SERPs. Schema markup on the other hand helps the crawlers understand what the data actually means whereas crawlers would have interpreted the same as a random group of words.

Take this, HTML of your website will tell the browser to display a certain logo or design in a specific location on the website. It won’t mention any more detail about the design or logo itself. Schema markup on the other hand will help in comprehending the same data more intelligently and make your content more efficient than it already is. A more intricate determination of your content makes search engines trust your data more and rewards you with higher placement in SERPs.

You Don’t Need to Master Anything New

Schema markup will not demand you to learn or be fluent in any new things than you already know. Or to hire any more developers than you already have. Websites with schema do well with just the use of HTML. All you need is to add a few schema.org vocabulary tags to your website’s code.

schema.org comes from the collaboration of industry giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing

Usually industry leaders are always seen as staunch competitors and expected to always be on each other’s necks. Contrary to the notion, professional teams from giants like Google, Yahoo and Bing came together for the creation of schema.org. They did so in order to provide the people all over the globe with the basic introduction and general structural assistance with implementation of schema markup on their website. The website provides generalized tags that are widely agreed upon that regulate the action that search engines initiate with the data on your web page.

Schema Markup is User Oriented

As a user you must be no stranger to the constant upgradation in the efficiency of search engines. What used to be a simple list of urls based on loosely relevant keywords can now provide you with more intricate details like price, location, timings, functionality, faqs along with several other informative fragments in just a click. All the attributes mentioned above and much more reside under schema markup. Instead of you doing the talking your place within the SERPs does everything for you.

Search engines were designed to provide users with the information they are looking for and schema markup allows search engines to classify that information for users. This complete user-centric upgradation can be labelled as “virtual business card” for business owners and brands.

What Makes Schema Important?

Your overall content can be segregated under a diverse list of titles. When it comes to running a flourishing business, diverse content is one of the major keys to advance with a jetpack on the back. Schema markup establishes the sundry data on your web pages into a structured data markup scheme. This allows your website to rank on more search pages, more queries and on more native content. A list of classification of data you can rank upon includes

• Location
• Articles
• Local Business
• TV Episodes and Movies
• Ratings and Reviews
• Book Summaries and Reviews
• Events
• Products and Sellers
• Description and Prices
• Software Applications
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

These are just a  few examples that constitute the around 5% of markups in the entire schema markup. There are hundreds of markup categories that differentiate from business to business which means the possibilities are endless.

It is a commonly stated and widely believed notion that websites with schema markup will rank better in SERPs than websites that refuse to work on their schema markup. A well regulated research was regulated to compare websites with appropriate markups and websites without the schema. Websites with markup schema were said to rank 4 stops higher than the websites that weren’t equipped with schema altogether. Even though there are multiple factors that constitute to make a website rank in the SERPs, it was strongly imposed that proper schema played the key role in the difference between these websites. Which means that professionals, even search engines themselves, are supporting more and more use of markup structures.

Here is an interesting insight, around one-third of global websites have imposed the use of schema markup and one-third of google search results alone consists of elements that reside under schema markup. This juxtaposition is enough of a statement for you to get working on  proper schema markup for your website if you want your brand to grow rapidly and have an upper hand on your competitors instantly.

How Does Schema Markup Work for SEO?

As we have successfully understood the importance of schema markup and decided to grab the opportunity whenever it presents itself in today’s evolving world, it brings us to finally validate our website and implement the adequate schema markups that our web pages need.

Visit Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper Web Tool

You can log into your webmasters account and click on markup helper from that page or simply click on this link – https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper

Select The Classification of Your Data

A number of data titles will appear on your screen as you visit the markup helper. From here you can type or copy paste the url of your website/webpage and proceed to select the appropriate tiles that signify the type of content on that webpage or website.

Signify Elements and Tags

Once you click start tagging a page within the web app will appear and lay a workspace for you to further tag specific elements on your website.

On the left segment you will see the contents of your website and the right panel denotes the title under which the elements of your website will sustain. This section is called tooltip.

For instance, say if you want to determine the author of a blog post or you want to apprise the name of an article under your markup schema. You can do it by simply highlighting the name of the article, which in most cases would be the H1 and simply select author or name from the tooltip.

Utilize what you can

You are running a brand and no brand can do all things. That is what being an expert or having a niche demands. As you keep adding elements in the “My Data Items” section, try to add whatever you can from your website, not even huge companies can check mark it all.

Create a Code

Don’t panic when we say create a code. You can simply download an HTML file by clicking “create HTML” on the top right corner. This file is made specifically for your website and specifically for the pages that you mentioned the elements for in the tooltip. All the microdata that is needed for your website to sustain a schema markup resides in this file.

Add Schema Markup to Your Website’s Code

Open your respective CMS screen or source code. Open the microdata file and spot the yellow highlights on the right of the text window. Copy the codes beside these highlighted segments and paste  Add these snippets into your CMS or source code.

You can simply download the HTML code file and copy/paste the code into your CMS or source code, however you feel comfortable.

As you finish with any of these steps you’ll be presented a pop up mentioning next steps. These are for you information. Proceed as you go through them.

Test Your Schema Markup Code

Once you are done with all the steps, you can go back to the step no.1 to assess the schema code on your website. Visit Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool and tap the HTML beside where you pasted your url previously. From here you can see how your webpage/website will look after the updation of schema.

Paste the schema code for your website under the HTML tab and click preview. The webmasters tool wil show you how each element under the schema markup will look in google’s search results.

You can also edit the markup code directly into the html tab and hit preview if you wish.

Tips when using Markup Schema for SEO

This article circles around the importance of schema markup and how it is the best time to begin with the practice in order to give you business a healthy start and a much needed boost. This article also helped you in getting started with the practice altogether.

But as you get on with the task of growing your website and managing the SEO on a more complex level as time passes by, here are some tips that will make the job easier for you and keep you organized.

Use Frequently Used Schemas

Remember we mentioned schema.org? You can visit the website and find out the most commonly used schemas according to the classification of your business and brand. Simply click on “Organization of Schemas” to view the list.

Only Use the Schemas You Need & Use Them All

There is a plethora of schema markups depending upon your business and brand. You can segregate the title by tapping “The Type Hierarchy”. This will open a master list that will give you all the markup that is available for you to use.

More Markups = Better

When you visit schema.org, you can visit the instructions tab and see that the website promotes excess markups on your website. Once you go through the wide selection of item lists, you might understand the endless possibilities for your content to be marked up and make your business blossom. Just make sure that you markup the content that is actually visible to the people who visit the web page.

Final Remarks

With the constant evolution of everything around us, from concepts to physical matter and even practices in the digital realm; schema markup is an innovative fragment that is bound to stay with us for a much longer time. It is just starting and even brands like Google are still testing out the possibilities of enhancements that come from this.

If you take your business seriously then it is about time that you invest some time and energy in gaining a first hand knowledge about this because there is no one else who knows more about your business than you. Schema markup aims to present all parts of your business to the potential consumers in the best and easiest way possible.