A Quick Start Guide to Schema – Your Competitive Edge
Rich snippets can make your search results stand out, improving click-through rate and traffic to your site.
Rich snippets can make your search results stand out, improving click-through rate and traffic to your site.
Did you know that that more than one-third of Google’s search results include a rich snippet with information derived from Schema.org? Despite the high percentage of rich snippets found in Google search results, Searchmetrics found that only 0.3 percent of all websites are using this microdata. On top of that, pages using these tags have better organic rankings in Google.
Matt Cutts was somewhat ambiguous about Schema’s impact on rankings in this October 12, 2012 video:
Google’s official position is they don’t “use markup for ranking purposes at this time.” Still, rich snippets can make your Web pages appear more prominently in SERPs, leading to an increase in traffic. With the evolution of the semantic Web, schema would seem to be a natural addition to the search algorithm in the future, as it is designed to connect things (not strings).
Schema, found at Schema.org, is a collection of different HTML tags that can be added to a Web page. These tags create an enhanced description that appears in search results (commonly known as rich snippets). Schema.org is the result of collaboration among top tier search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Yandex dating back to 2011.
To add schema, you simply create tags according to the schema.org category for the data you’re tagging. For example, to create a schema tag for a person, you have to set the itemtype to http://schema.org/Person. A full list of items you can mark up with Schema can be found here.
Creating your schema tags is actually fairly simple. You don’t need to constantly go back and forth between your HTML code and Google’s schema documents because Google has created a Structured Data Markup Helper tool.
After you select a category and enter a Web page address, the tool opens a preview of the site along with a bar on the side that lists all of the available tags. All you have to do is highlight a section of text on the page preview and right click to see a list of available tags. Click the tag you want and it will fill in the information on the sidebar. Once you’re ready to get the code, click the Create HTML button. It’s very simple – just add the generated code to the page. Third-party tools like Schema Creator have also simplified the process of creating schema.
Once in place, you may test your markup by using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
While there are many different types and subtypes listed on schema.org, the site doesn’t have everything. What if you have an item that isn’t listed? You can actually create a schema extension by adding another slash onto the end of an existing type and entering your new subtype. For example, if you want to designate someone as an archivist, you could make that a subtype of librarian. The tag would read Person/Librarian/Archivist. In this case, both Librarian and Archivist are actually extensions. Google and its partners have added extensive documentation to schema.org outlining how to create these extensions.
Many Web developers were unhappy when schema was first announced because it appeared that some information types that were used by other markup formats wouldn’t be compatible. That meant they were going to have to add yet another type of tag to their Web pages. However, Google responded to this concern and made schema compatible with a number of different structured markups like RDFa or JSON-LD.
You don’t need to add schema to your Web pages. That said, do you really want to risk falling behind, should Google incorporate schema into the ranking algorithm? Even without a SERP boost, rich snippets do make your search results stand out, offering improved CTR and traffic.