Schema Markup

Schema markup or structured data is a way of telling the search engines who you are and what you offer that is deeper and more specific than just using the older (but still important) methods of on site optimization. It is a new layer of optimization that many firms simply do not understand and an important part of technical SEO. It of course robots who are indexing your site so the best way to be properly indexed is to speak to the robots in the language they understand and schema markup is more descriptive to them. It helps align the digital assets you have with your site in a more effective manor and tells the search engines a lot of important details they just do not get with regular on site optimization.

You can see how much structured data is included in your website by running the home page and then the individual pages through Googles Structured Data Testing Tool This will tell you if there is any schema markup and if it has any errors that prevent it from being read.

The tool will not tell you if the data itself is correct just if its formatted correctly. We do a deep dive into your schema data and either create it from scratch or fix any errors we find in the data. If you are not using structured data now you are already missing out, as more and more sites have this done it will become more and more vital to have your structured data done well. This is not just the future of on site optimization it is the now of on site optimization don’t get left behind.

Schema markup is also important to the knowledge graph for your company. If you have seen competitors with listings on the side of the page and wondered how they got all that information included when yours is not or even incorrect its due to structured data or the lack thereof.

As the technology of the search engines increase its important to keep up with those new advances. At one point they just counted the number of times a word was used on the page to see if you should rank for a term, then people stuffed keywords and even made them the same color as the page to hide the extra keywords, Google figured that out and stopped looking at how many times a word was used and started looking at meta data, the people overdid that and Google made changes stopping even looking at meta keywords. What is amazing to me is that there are still SEO people stuffing keywords into their meta descriptions even though Google has not used them in many many years. Your title tags and meta descriptions are still vital to ranking but now the schema data is becoming in many cases more important.