Even if you live under a rock and have never heard much about search engine optimization and marketing, you would have heard enough about the need to build links to a page or website, to make it rank higher in search results. You would also have heard SEO practitioners bang on about on-page and off-page search engine optimization. One of the finer and less known talked about but with potential to significantly impact the volume of traffic to your website is structured data.
So what is structured data?
Structured data is a consistent arrangement to make more visible to users and search engines the information about a particular web page. It helps the search engine like Google, Bing and other search engines to have a better comprehension of what a particular webpage is basically about.
Structured data are also known as schema markup, helps searchers and robots with more information by creating additional tags and attributes to HTML.
The additional pieces of information and tags created by the structured data persuade users to click on it. That is, structured data contributed to higher CTR.
Structured data simplified
A lot of people might have heard about structured data on a web page or website, but a lot do not understand what the terms exactly mean? What structured data does and the connection structured data have with SEO. I felt like that before, that’s why I have written this article for every reader to have a better understanding of what structured data means, how it is used, and its importance for a website and SEO.
Structured data is an on-page markup that helps the search engines to have a better understanding of the information on a website. Structured data helps the search engine to understand what content means not just what it says.
Apart from helping Google spiders to understand your content better, structures data aides in improving more visibility in the search engine result pages.
There are different kinds of structured data, there is structured data for reviews, movies, books, and products for online stores. In most cases, structured data adds more details to a snippet in the search result.
Types of Structured Data
There might be other types of structured data, but according to Google, the three most popular and widely used include:
- JSON-LD: JSON-LD is a JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the page head or body. The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express. This type of structured data is most recommended by Google. Google can read JSON-LD data. When it is dynamically injected into the pages’ contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in a content management system.
- RDFa: RDFa is an HTML5 extension that supports; linked data by introducing HTML tag attributes that correspond to the user-visible content that is intended to be described to search engines. RDFa is commonly used in both the head and body sections of the HTML page.
- Microdata is an open-community HTML specification used to nest structured data within HTML content? Like RDFa, it uses the HTML tag attributed to name the properties you want to expose as structured data. It is typically used in the page body but can be used in the head. Microdata is the manual way of inserting structured data on a website or page.
Is structured data important for SEO?
Yes, structured data is important for SEO. It is structured data that makes it possible for Google to know that the site in the screenshot above Hope Spring Water is an African water poverty alleviation charity.
Structured data makes it easier for Google to understand what a page is about. For instance, structured data helps search engine to understand that this is Haba Naija digital marketing page
Structured data is like a mouthpiece that interprets the content of a page in the simplest way to google which in turn helps a page to rank better in google.
Also, structured data helps to improve the way a product or search result snippets appear on SERPs. It helps show more information about your products to your customers. Which results in more clicks and an eventual lead to a higher ranking on the search engine pages.
Some benefits of structured data
- Here are some of the benefits of structured data. Structured data helps sites to be easily accessible to searchers i.e a structured data tells the search engine what your content is about, the search engine, in turn, has a better understanding of your content and displays it in a useful, and relevant way for searchers.
- A structured data helps you to stand out on the organic search result.
- Imagine a product, article, business, having additional information, reviews and maps, this will seduce searchers to click. It helps to optimize for a voice search
- While voice search is the new thing on SERPs structured data helps to optimize a product or content for a genuine voice search.
- Structured data helps to attract readers to a website or blogs article It
- helps to drive greater insights for website analytics
Authors bio
Demola Ojo is a search engine optimization and digital marketing specialist, with Haba Naija. He enjoys all things digital marketing. You can contact him via our contact page