Google Structured Data

Schema or Schema.org & Google Structured Data Markup.

SEO, Google Structured Data & Search Engines.

It’s beneficial to use structured data on your web pages so that Google, Bing, and Yahoo learn about your content faster. When search engines fully understand your content, your web pages stand a greater chance of being ranked higher and quicker. Essentially, Google structured data consists of tags which highlight name and value pairs. These name and value pairs allow webmasters the chance to inform search engines of all aspects of their content. Using Microdata is one way of encoding your data, however, Google offers several options.

What is Schema & Schema.org?

Schema or Schema.org is a collaborative project by the top search engines who have created a unified language to help webmasters highlight their content. This could be a review, an article, or product that is highlighted to potential visitors or customers in the SERPS. So essentially the Schema collaboration have created a semantic vocabulary whereby a whole host of tags can be used to markup your data.

The semantic vocabulary as per Schema.org can be encoded in three ways:

RDFa;
Microdata;
JSON-LD.

What Does Google Structured Data Markup Look Like?

Have a look at the following graphic to gain an insight into how structured data markup is created.

Use the following link to encode your own article and test your markup:

Google Testing Tool

To fully understand Google structured data and Schema markup, firstly we need to comprehend semantics.

What Does Semantic Mean?

The word semantic can be best defined as relating to meaning in language or logic. So how does Google for example understand your content? Google uses many algorithms; however, it the Hummingbird algorithm that uses schema markup to better understand your content.

Google’s Hummingbird and Rankbrain Algorithm

Google’s Hummingbird algorithm uses semantics to understand the meaning of words and sentences before it can rank web pages. One way Google can learn the meaning of a sentence in your content is by interpreting the markup.

Four of the top search engines collaborate to produce the Schema markup that helps their search bots understand your content. Their aim is to promote schemas for structured data for web pages, the Internet and email messages etc.

In conclusion, Google structured data helps their search engine bots to better understand your content. I personally use the JSON-LD encoding format for my web pages. For WordPress, you can either use Yoast’s SEO plugin or the Schema plugin. Alternatively, you can encode your web pages manually using the tags set out by Schema.org. See below for some great links.

JSON-LD markup tags help search engine bots to better understand your content. A better understanding can lead to faster and higher rankings in the SERPS.