Search Engines work hard to understand the content of the page. That is where Schema markup comes into play.
Schema.org (often called Schema) is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. Schema is recognized (and in fact, the vocabulary is maintained) by Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and Yandex.
It's unclear whether other search engines are using this markup to change how they display search results. Search results that have schema applied, inform the user faster.
You’ve probably already encountered marked-up content in the form of rich snippets.
But schema markup can do more than that and help your SEO in other ways. However, the primary function of the markup is to help search engines better understand your content.
But in the bigger picture, schema markup is a crucial part of structured data that makes the semantic web and search possible.
In layman’s terms, it allows URLs to convey the actual meaning of their content to machines like the Googlebot.
The only way that schema can hurt you is if your competitor is using it and you are not. According to Search Engine Land, by implementing schema, you could get a 30% increase in click-through rate.
Our goal in this article is not to provide you with details about the types of schema markups available. Instead, we want to provide some knowledge about the simple ways we used to add schema to our website.
Instead, we want to provide some knowledge about the simple ways we used to add schema to our website.
Get familiar with schema.org
Schema.org is your point of reference here. The schema consists of a two-level hierarchy system. At the top, you have types, and each type has a set of defined properties.
Types categorize the content block that you’re marking up. Its properties then describe the content.
Each type of information has properties that can be used to describe items in more detail.
For example, a "book," which falls under the category "creative work," can have the properties "name" (title), "author," "illustrator," and more, depending on how fully you want to describe it.
Similarly, an "event" can be classified as anything from a "business event" to a "theater event."
Before you begin to add schema to your web pages, you need to figure out the ‘item type’ of the content on your webpage.
For example, does your web content focus on food? Music? Tech?
Once you’ve figured out the item type, you can now determine how you can tag it up.
Deploy the code on your website
This step will differ depending on your website and tagging system. We’re talking JSON-LD here as the recommended schema format.
We’ll go through these three implementation methods:
Straight into the HTML
Using Google Tag Manager
Using a CMS and plugins
Straight into the HTML
JSON-LD schema is formatted as a script that’s placed into the <head> or<body> of your HTML.
If you’re not the webmaster, talk to your developers and agree on how to assign this task to them.
This will likely include mapping URLs or their categories to different schemas and highlighting static and dynamic values (think brand vs. price for product schema).
Using Google Tag Manager
For a long time, people thought deploying schema markup through GTM wasn’t a good option because Googlebot needs to render JavaScript to access it.
However, Google recently added GTM implementation as one of the officially endorsed options.
This is especially good for marketers who are comfortable working with GTM. It’s an excellent workaround for companies where it takes a long time to get SEO changes implemented by the development team.
We can only recommend this method if you’re already using GTM to manage your marketing technology stack.
Just paste the created schema as a custom HTML tag and set up the trigger based on a page view to a specific page or pages.
Using a CMS and plugins
This is the most common and beginner-friendly way to deploy schema markup. But due to the number of different CMS and plugins, it can also be the most confusing one.
There’s no CMS or plugin that does all the work for you. If you require a more advanced schema markup, you’ll inevitably have to combine the available options.
That can also involve adjusting your themes and templates, or injecting the code on a page directly or via GTM.
There are plenty of tools out there that will help you create your schema markup, and even validate it.
Here are just a few.
Generators
JSON-LD Schema Generator by Merkle (We are using).
Validators and test tools
Google Search Console Rich Cards
For those WordPress people, here are a couple of plugins.
WordPress Plugins
If you are not confident yet in how to add schema to your website & validate it, watch this video that helped us understand, how to proceed.
We hope you are having a good idea & all the answers to your queries related to schema markup after that much details.
We wish you all the luck on your path to structured data & schema markup for your website.
Conclusion
Hopefully, any fears that you might have had when you heard the word “Schema” or “Structured Data” have been put to rest.
Schema is much easier to apply than it seems and it’s a best practice that you need to incorporate into your web pages.