The endgame of all SEO strategies is to get more (quality) traffic to your site. Search engines like Google crawl the pages of your site and run them through a scoring system to help its algorithm understand a lot of things – page accessibility, user experience, and content. Search algorithms have come a long way in learning what a page is about and how relevant its information is to searchers, but they’re far from perfect.
Search engines need as much information about the context of a page as they can get to effectively rank a page. One method search engines gain context over a page is through Schema.org Markup (Schema). Put simply, Schema is a semantic vocabulary of tags used to help search engines better understand and represent the context of your page.
What is Schema Markup?
Search engine crawlers use a site’s content found in the HTML to learn about the content of a page. Information in the heading and body are read, valued, and indexed to return to users when they search. In some instances, a search engine can have trouble determining the context of information.
For example, a page with a heading 1 titled “The Cowboys” can be about a number of things. It may be an article discussing the latest draft picks for the Dallas Cowboys football team, an article about the American wild west, or a 1972 movie called The Cowboys. Without any other information, search engines won’t know the context of what the page is about or who the page is for.
Schema offers SEO marketers a collection of shared vocabularies to better define their pages for crawls by four major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Yandex. This vocabulary is expressed in the page’s HTML using three key attributes –
- Itemscope: Terms used to describe what the page is “about”. This starts the DOM tree for the Schema.
- Itemtype: Terms used to describe a specific “item” about a topic.
- Itemprop: Terms used to describe the “properties” of the item.
The schema vocabulary has grown to cover a multitude of topics. The broadest itemtype is “Thing” and has four properties: name, description, url and image. There are also highly specific itemtypes like “LocalBusiness” with their unique sets of property attributes that help refine the identity of your page. Of the many itemtypes, the most common are:
- Creative Works
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Place
- Product
Finding the itemtype that best fits the context of your page will help strengthen its search ranking. Not only will it make your page more visible by offering more information than the standard headline and description, search engines will have more information to better understand the value of your content to specific searches. In our next blog post, we’ll discuss the application of Schema and the leading strategies used to push your page higher in the search listings. Stay tuned!
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