Improve the display of search results with Schema.org
What is Schema.org?
Schema.org is a Microdata vocabulary; not a language in and of itself. Using Schema.org and microdata makes it possible for search engines to understand your website content beyond simple HTML and text analysis. Schema.org markup has some highly specialized markups that will tell search engines that the content is actually talking about a “person,” “place,” “thing,” “movie,” “music” and so forth.
How will the search engines utilize Microdata?
By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages—tags that say, “Hey search engine, this information describes this specific movie, or place, or person, or video”—you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way. Microdata is a set of tags, introduced with HTML5, that allows you to do this. Search engines, particularly Google, Yahoo and Bing will easily understand your content the way you intend it to be understood. If the content is well-understood, search engines will start showing “rich snippets” in search engine results which are actually based on your markup. This extended markup allows webmasters to add additional markup to their site to help search engines better understand their content.
Example of Schema.org rich snippets showing in Google
Implementing Schema.org and Microdata
Adding microdata to web pages is pretty straight forward. Simply add the appropriate attributes to specify the information. You can view the Schema.org types and properties here: http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#schemaorg_types
Below is an example of a product with microdata:
Google has a rich snippets testing tool that will validate the code on your site: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
What does Schema.org mean for search engine optimization (SEO)?
We here at Optimize Worldwide anticipate an increased traffic for sites which utilize the schema.org markup. We have adopted this practice as part of our standard web development optimization. Search engines will give natural preferences to pages that give a clear window into their content. Regardless of what type of website you have, there are always ways you can use Schema.org, even if it’s simply defining an article and the publish date.
Contact Optimize Worldwide, (530) 710-8283 or seo@optimizeworldwide.com, to get started. We’ll implement Schema.org an microdata across all of your web properties to improve the display of your search results in Bing, Google and Yahoo.
