Schema markup is critically important if you want people to see an enhanced description of your webpage that appears in search results. The markup utilizes a unique semantic vocabulary in microdata format. Believe it or not, the big three (Google, Bing, Yahoo) collaborated to create the informative and helpful community of Shchema.org. Even the Russian company, Yandex, pitched in. With respect to Hummingbird and Rank Brain, Schema markup is a must when it comes to search optimization and digital marketing for local search.
Rank Brain is an AI program created by Google to help process search queries. An amazing amount of written language becomes mathematical entities and vectors that computers can understand. Hummingbird, on the other hand, has the ability to sort through an infinite amount of data and return the results that are most relevant to the search query.
Boost Your SEO with Schema Markup
Internet search constantly evolves, and markup is that latest evolution. It also happens to be one of the least used, most powerful, forms of search engine optimization available to website owners. Once your company solves the mystery of the markup, it’s becomes far easier to rank higher when people search for your product or service. According to industry stats, less than one-third of websites use Schema markup codes. This is good news for your company, but bad news for competitors. Think of all the websites that you won’t have to compete with.
An important fact about markup is that it goes beyond merely explaining what data says—it explains what data means. This is why site owners should step back, size things up, and take control of how the business is being understood by search engines. You have to learn how to talk to search engines in a language they can understand. Translating page content into a markup that search engines will understand includes the following.
- First, you must produce the best page content. Then choose a markup class describing it as a standard group of properties.
- Your markup codes will come in several formats including microdata, JSON, and RDFa. JSON, Javascript Object Notation) is the syntax for exchanging information that humans can easily understand.
You’ll become familiar with the term “rich results”. The terms rich cards, or rich snippets, are previous descriptions. Effectively using the markup rewards your site with results like right-hand side locations on the screen, local business information, and specific actions or panels on the right-hand side of the user’s screen. This works, especially, for local business SEO.
You can always count on Google to lead the way in making sure that users have the best online experiences possible. As such, Google has announced more than 10 elements that include best features and health graphs. Google also added documentation and a Schema.org vocabulary. In fact, Google bases its entire search documentation on structured data. Google has also recently offered several search features that include, but not limited to, movies, local restaurants, learning courses, recipes, image search badges, and job postings.
These are all based on structured data. Here’s what you may have already guessed! Google considers markup in its ranking and indexing algorithm. It all goes back to the fact that Google continually mixes things up to make sure that site owners provide the best experiences possible for site visitors.
Planet 8 Digital is committed to helping small businesses grow through SEO, Web design, video marketing, PPC/Adwords, social media marketing, and much more. We typically design websites using WordPress, and there are several rich-snippet plugins that we can build that yield the best results for multi-page websites. Contact us to learn more about what we can do to help your business thrive.