Everything You Need to Know About Structured Data

Structured data is a method of structuring your website code in a way that helps search engine bots to better understand the content of the page, and as a result that leads to higher ranking in search engine result page (SERP) on relevant keywords.

For a good structure of the content, you need a vocabulary to markup them. Don’t be worried about these terms now, I know it may sound too technical for some people.

But I promise at the end of this article you will be able to implement structured data on your site by yourself. I’ll take you through a step-by-step process that teaches how you can implement your site on your own.

Schema.org is a collaborative program supported by all major search engines like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structuring the data on the Internet.

Schema.org (often called Schema) is a semantic vocabulary of tags ( microdata) that you can add to your HTML code.

It changes your content into code so that search engines can easily read the codes and use them to display search results in a specific and better way.

Why Add Structured Data on My Website?

As we discussed earlier, Structured data is a way of providing a better context for search engines, so they can easily read what is on your page and better understand it.

But some believe that structured data will increase ranking, but there is no real evidence that this is true. Instead, it provides full knowledge of your website, like meta tags, content, keywords & other titles on your site pages so that search engines can accurately suggest content when people type in relevant search queries.

When your content will start ranking higher in search engines you must also have proper knowledge about On-page SEO, through this you can optimize your content properly, reduce your site loading time, and meta tags, etc, and all of this will lead to grab more audiences on your website.

We here at Incrementors with more than 10 years of experience do the same for our clients, by taking care of all their on-page SEO requirements.

When search engines know exact data about your page, they can do some pretty neat things with that data and sometimes will show your content as a rich result in the SERP. Rich results usually contain images or other visual content & go into more detail than traditional search results.

And if your content will be rich in results this will help you to attract more traffic and will show your site at the top of the page. So the main query that arises in our mind is that what is rich results so let us discuss it.

Related: Optimize Your Content for Search Intent

What Are Rich Results and Its Benefits?

Rich results are made up of rich snippets and new rich cards & they are different from normal blue link results. Rich results offer more image space, a carousel feature & reviews or ratings, etc. Still confused, let’s make it easy with the help of the image shown below, definitely you will come to Know About Structured Data.

These results are designed to highlight important information and help search engines to understand a page’s purpose as accurately as possible.

Now you can easily compare rich results with the regular results displayed below:

Both of the results appear on the same search result page. First, there is a rich result with an image, star ratings, and the expected preparation time. Then, there is a recipe carousel that includes a few recipe cards.

The major benefit of Rich results is that Rich results appear at the top of the results page even if you aren’t ranking top in the traditional results, you will still be the first thing users see on a search results page if your content appears in the rich result.

The Necessity Of Schema.org In Structured Data

Schema.org is a form of semantic tags or microdata that are used to enhance the way search engines represent and read your page by adding it to the HTML.

To achieve the Structured Data protocol schema.org community has two groups, first is the steering group and the second one is the larger community group.

Their main work is creating, discussing & updating is done by the community group, and the other than this entire process is managed by the smaller group also known as the steering group.

We need Schema.org in Structured data because for organizing something, rules are necessary, the same goes with structured data. If you want to make Structured data you need to take help from schema.org.

Search engines support structured data in the form of JSON-LD, Microdata, and RDFa format and they prefer JSON-LD format because it is easy to implement.

How to Implement Structured Data in Your Website.

Now you will get a very easy step-by-step procedure that will explain the implementation of structured data on a website that will help you as well as other people.

1. Structured Data Markup Helper Tool

In the first step, you need to open up a structured data markup helper. This is an excellent tool given by Google itself and it is free to use.

2. Select a Data Type

Now you need to choose the data type to initiate the process, then paste the URL or HTML source code of the page that you prefer to structure below the box.

As you can see in the image, I selected the type as an article and included my webpage URL.

3. Start Marking up Your Webpage

After the URL submission, Google will load your web page inside the window and after that, you just need to select the items on your webpage that you want to markup.

When you click on the items like the heading of your article this tool will show you all the options that are available, so you can easily choose the appropriate option. In the image below you can see all the available markup options.

Now you can see in the image given below that all the marked items are added on the right sidebar as marketing strategies of the tool named as my data items.

4. Download the HTML

Now in this step, you have to click on the view HTML button to get the snippet of your code that you can add to your webpage very easily.

After clicking on view HTML you’ll see the code that is by default is in JSON-LD format but you can change it into microdata as well by clicking on the download button. But I’ll suggest you keep it in JASON-LD format.

Now, here is your final code that will look like as an image given below:

5. Test Your Markup With Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

In this step for testing the markup code, you need to copy and paste it into the tool named test your structured data and click on the run test option and it will show you all the errors and warnings. According to recommendations, you can easily further optimize your code as per your need.

6. Publish Your Markup on Your Webpage

At the last stage, to publish your markup, you just need to copy and paste the new HTML markup into the CMS or source code of your web page.

How Structured Data Help You to Build Your Brand

• When you have well-maintained structured data then search engines understand all the parts of your business, your content, and your brand better.
• After that search engines match your content more accurately to relevant search results.
• If your content matches then search engines with the help of structured data include more information on the search results page for your content, like a location from an event page, cooking time from a recipe page, or a review from a customer success page.
• These kinds of improvements help Google to build a better, accurate knowledge graph about your brand & also lead to more ranking keywords.
• All of this can lead to more organic impressions and organic clicks & when people come again and again to your website it will help you to rank higher on the Search Engine Results Page.

Free Testing Tools for Structured Data

There are plenty of testing tools for Structured Data, but now you will get to know about some free Structured Data Testing Tools.

What’s the Difference Between a Featured Snippet and a Rich Snippet?

In simple words, a Featured snippet is an answer to a query that appears above organic search results whereas the Rich snippet is an enhanced organic search result.

Featured snippets can be of several types for example- Paragraph Featured Snippet, List Featured Snippet & Table Featured Snippet & they are shown based on the structure of your webpage which is done by assigning heading HTML tags.

Example of a featured snippet:

Whereas, when the search engines fully understand your structured data then it appears as a rich snippet and that is achieved by adding schema markup to your web page.

Example of the Rich snippet:

Structured Data Implementation Guidelines

As we all know if we want to access anything from a search engine whether it is a tool or a website. Then we have to follow some guidelines that are already provided by the search engines.

The same goes with structured data, If we use it for relevant content then it is very good but if search engines find spammy structured data or spammy content on your website then you have to face consequences like manual action from Google on your page or less favorable ranking or be marked as ineligible for rich results in Google Search.

Conclusion:

From all the technical terms and information discussed above in this article here are my final thoughts. If you can use it in a proper method this will boost your website significantly and sets you apart from most of the competitors.

I understand that structured data requires some technical understanding but if you learn it then it will pay you back. By reading this article you will come to Know About Structured Data.

Author Bio: 

Brack Nelson has good SEO experience working with different companies and clients on a long term basis. Currently, he is working as a marketing manager at Incrementors web solutions. He enjoys creating and implementing new marketing strategies as well as utilizing social media. Apart from that, he loves to spend time with children and books, that’s what makes him feel alive.