A few years ago in 2011, some search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo & Yandex got together to create a standardized format of entities which help others to better understand what the webpage is all about & which they all agreed to support and it became known as schema.org. But still, there is so much confusion about what is structured data, why it is for & how and when it is implemented for SEO. Even Bing had carried a survey and found that only 15-16% of marketers are using structured data markup on their website.
What is Structured Data?
Structured Data is a term i.e simply refers to organize any data in a format that help others to better understand. For example, if you have a lot of information in your data like meetings, dates, times, people, then you’ll organize them into a tabular form with rows & columns for each type of information, i.e called you are structuring the data.
Structured data briefly describe to search engines what exactly your data means. Without structured data markup, search engines can only tell what your data says, and you have to work harder to determine why it’s there. When you create a web page, it is very hard to understand a specific element for search engines. That’s why structured data is important for SEO in Digital marketing. Structured data allows a search engine to not only crawl your website but also it truly understand it.
There are 2 types of structured data such as,
- Schema
- Microformat
Schema is the most commonly used approach to structured data markup for SEO purposes. Some websites use the Microformat vocabulary, it is most often for marking up product reviews or defining a physical location.
There are some types of schema with which your website makes easier and better to understand. They are reviews snippet, ratings, Q&A, breadcrumb, local business listing, logo, product (information about a product, including price, availability), site links search box, videos, etc.
Structured data markup is an HTML markup that comes as codes. In addition to being able to use different vocabularies to mark up your site, you can also implement structured data markup in different ways using syntaxes. For Schema vocabulary, the best ways to add a markup to your site are either through using the Microdata, or JSON-LD or RDFA. With Microdata markup and RDFA markup, your structured data is integrated within the main body HTML of the page, whereas JSON-LD uses a JavaScript object to insert all of your markups into the head of the page.
For SEO purposes, the Microdata approach was originally the recommended one, but the JSON-LD approach has improved in the past few years and now it is the recommended approach.
Structured Data Markup Helper is one of the most useful Google’s free tools to help your business started with structured data. This structured data markup tool helps and enhances Google’s understanding of the content on your website.
Impacting structured data markup directly into your website ensures to everyone that this information is available. To do this with Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, submit a web page to the helper and use your mouse to “tag” different page elements. When you are finished tagging, the structured data Markup Helper will generate sample HTML code with microdata markup or JSON-LD markup. Then you can download this code and put it into your website.
Hence, to add structured data to your pages because during indexing, we will be able to better understand what your site is about. It will help us to understand your pages better, and it leads to better ranks in some sense indirectly, because of this we can rank easier.
