Table of contents
Schema.org – why is it important?
The algorithm of the Google search engine is an organism that is constantly modified, allowing for even better provision of information and accurate answers to user inquiries. Tracking and adapting changes is a great way to ensure that our website is recognized as the one that best answers a given question. For Google robots to be able to examine and analyze the data found on the website more precisely, it is worth serving them in an accessible form – through microdata. And that brings us to the crucial question – what is schema.org?
Schema.org – what is it?
Schema.org is a project that was born out of the cooperation of the most significant search engines. For several years, it has been playing an increasingly important role in search results and, among others, allows you to extend the results with additional information or graphics – so-called “rich snippets”.
Schema.org tags can be used to mark up many kinds of data, sometimes very detailed. Let us mention some of them:
- the most popular tags will undoubtedly be those in which you can place company data, i.e., graphics with a logo, name, and contact details, as well as opening days and hours,
- website and article data – website name, the title of the post, its content, and date of the last update,
- evaluation – of products, services, and articles.
Schema tags also allow for a broader presentation of products from online stores. Correct marking of the offer elements will allow you to display in the search results the name of the product and its description contained in the meta description, its price, the number of items in the warehouse, weight, and other parameters. Additional information in the search results is not only a chance to attract attention with a “higher” result in SERPs but also to provide the potential customer with the necessary information at the level of the search engine.
Microdata can be implemented in several ways:
- via JSON-LD, i.e., the code pasted in the head part of the page,
- via RDF, which is a kind of extension of HTML5 tags
- via Microdata which, like RDFa, adds tags directly to HTML tags.
To make it easier to add and implement schema, it is worth using a ready-made tool provided by Google – https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/?hl=pl, thanks to which we can easily mark the most critical information on the website.
Summary
SEO forecasts for 2018 predict schema tags will be one of the factors in the search engine algorithm that will gain importance. We will know how much their role will increase and how it will translate into the positions of the websites after observing the results in the upcoming months. However, it is worth placing microdata at your address today and making it easier for Google robots to read our website correctly.
Update – how schema looks like in 2023?
Schema.org is still essential for many sites – from webshops to local florists. Rich results are now… well, very rich, and along with title and meta description, in search results now you can see additional information about articles, courses, datasets, employers and other rankings, job postings, local businesses, movies, videos, faqs, recipes, products, and math problems solver. Good thing – now it is a base element for many CMS and shops, and you don’t have to add it manually.
2023 came with a big AI blow-up. Schema.org now interprets data not only for Google bots. With the increasing use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in search engines, the importance of schema has only increased.
