SEO is complicated. There are thousands of ranking factors that Google and other search engines take into account when analyzing a website. With 70-80% of users ignoring paid search results , optimizing for these factors is more important than ever.
But how do search engines crawl websites and interpret their information to begin with? Primarily through the content and backend of a page. That’s where schema markup comes into the picture.
Think of it as the language search engines speak. It helps them understand what a page is about while showing more valuable information to users.
Don’t worry if this all sounds complicated. We’ll teach you more about what schema markup is and how to apply it for SEO benefits ahead.
What is schema markup?
Schema markup is a form of structured data that contains information about a web page. Specifically, it is organized in such a way that search engines can quickly understand and extract the main nuggets from each page.
Typically, fax lists schema markup manifests itself as featured snippets, rich snippets, and visual data. You probably have a lot of these without realizing it.
Despite being very important for SEO, personalization and branding some sites still fail to optimize their schema markup, which can lead to lost rankings and traffic being stolen by competitors. Alternatively, making quick fixes to your schema can lead to a nice SEO boost while improving click-throughs and UX.
Let’s talk about the Types of Schema Markup next.
The main types of schema markup
There are literally hundreds of different types of schema markup according to the official site schema.org . All of these are used for very specific pages and for displaying specific information to search engines.
However, most websites will find that using the basic types of schema is very beneficial. They include:
Item
Article Outline – also known as blog post outline: Contains additional information about the news item or blog post. It usually includes the featured Image , title, and publication date. It looks like this:
