In The Schema Things: An essential guide to Schema | Varn

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19 November 2019

In The Schema Things: An essential guide to Schema for your website: Part 1

All webmasters want the same thing, relevant traffic to their site. And we all know that performing well in search engine results = traffic on site. However, despite all webmasters knowing this basic equation, only a very small proportion of sites are using a key SEO tool, Schema Markup!

So what is schema markup, what are the benefits and how is it implemented?

Schema.org is a vocabulary that was created by Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Yandex to help site owners to better communicate information about the content of their site to search engines. Not only is it important for a website to be optimised for web users, but the site code must be optimised using markup to convey important information to search engines, so that they can represent the site appropriately in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If you unsure on how to communicate the content of your site to search engines, which schema to use for your industry and type of site, and how to implement it, then this is the blog series for you! Each blog in the series will focus on specific types of websites, such as e-commerce, publishing, local and event sites, and the schema that each of these sites should be using to make their SERP results perform better.

In the first part of our ‘In The Schema Things’ blog series, we will be focusing on the basic schema that should be present on all sites, regardless of the type of website or industry. So let’s get started with Part 1…..

Organisation Schema Markup

What is Organisation Schema Markup?

Organisation Schema Markup provides search engines with information about your brand, allowing you to communicate information about your organisation such as your Logo, Contact Information, Location, Social Profile Links, Founder and many more.

What does it look like?

What are the benefits of using Organisation Schema Markup?

Using Organisation Schema Markup improves the information shown on the Knowledge Graph and Website Snippet for your site on SERPs.

WebSite Schema Markup

What is WebSite Schema Markup?

WebSite Schema Markup can help to add a site search box feature to your site listing for brand searches. In order to use schema to generate the site search box on SERPs, you must have search functionality within your website.

What does it look like?

What are the benefits of using WebSite Schema Markup?

The addition of a site search box to your listing in SERPs can have a large impact on your Click Through Rate as not only does it increase the size of your listing in the results, therefore making it more eye-catching, it also allows users to search your site directly from SERPs. This improves user experience as it reduces their journey from the SERP to the exact information they were looking for on your site.

Breadcrumb Schema Markup

What is Breadcrumb Schema Markup?

Implementing Breadcrumb Schema Markup to your breadcrumbs sends a signal to search engines about how you would like your breadcrumb to be displayed. Search engines can then generate Breadcrumb rich snippets rather than just showing the page URL.

What does it look like?

What are the benefits of using Breadcrumb Schema Markup?

There are many benefits to adding Breadcrumb schema markup – both for searchers and search engines alike. Breadcrumb rich snippets incite click throughs from the SERPs as they are clearer and user-friendly and give searchers an insight into what to expect to see on the ranking page of the website. In addition, breadcrumb schema indicates the structure of the site to search engines, making it easier for them to understand your site and it’s hierarchy.

Site Navigation Schema Markup

What is Site Navigation Schema Markup?

The addition of SiteNavigationElement Markup to your code helps search engines to understand the structure and navigation of your site. Often search engines will use this information to influence the organic sitelinks that are shown in the search results.

What does it look like?

What are the benefits of using Navigation Schema Markup?

Not only does adding SiteNavigationElement markup to your site help search engines to understand the structure of your site, but it helps to influence the organic sitelinks shown on your result listing. The benefit of having relevant organic sitelinks is that it will help searchers to navigate directly to the information they are looking for, and improve click-through rates on your results.

Adding and Testing Schema

Now you are aware of the basic types of schema that should be implemented on all sites, you’ll probably be wondering how to add this schema to your site. A great tool for starting is Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, which will help you to generate your schema markup by following simple steps such as the type of data you want to markup, the page for it to be added to, and the elements you want to markup. Once you have selected this information, the tool will create the HTML schema markup code that you need to insert into your code.

Once you have added the relevant code to your site, you can test your markup using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool. This will give you a preview of the search results listing and allow you to inspect your markup elements.

Key Takeaways:

  • Schema helps site owners to communicate information about their site to search engines in a vocabulary that they can understand.
  • All sites should have Organisation schema markup, WebSite schema markup, Breadcrumb schema markup and Site Navigation schema markup.
  • You can create and test schema markup code using Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper and Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

We hope you have enjoyed the first blog in our ‘In The Schema Things’ series. Keep an eye out for the next part where we will be focusing on schema for E-commerce sites.

If you are interested in finding out more about optimising your site using Schema, contact the experts at Varn.

Article by: Katie, Technical SEO Expert More articles by Katie

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