Schema mark-up: what it is and how to use it

Getting your website seen by the appropriate audience is the most important part of any marketing strategy. Working hard to build and develop your brand is ultimately futile if no one gets to see it.

Implementing schema mark-up is a strategy that is not for beginners or the faint-hearted, but at Edge45® we’ve got the requisite chops to do it properly.

What is schema mark-up?

Schema is a form of micro data that enables search engines to parse and interpret information to help web searchers retrieve more relevant results. When schema mark-up is applied to elements of a website’s HTML code, it provides the search engine crawlers with extra data to define and know how to treat information.

Schema mark-up tells the search engine what data means, not purely what it says. This means the search engine can more accurately interpret website content, increasing the likelihood of your website visibility increasing.

How do I use schema mark-up?

Schema mark-up is not a quick and easy fix, nor is it a sloppy ‘bad practice hack’ to increase web traffic. It is a strategy to be used with other digital marketing tools to promote your business.

One of the best places to implement schema mark-up strategy is in data you want to show as extra information about your brand on a web search result. When search engines discover this mark up, it will read tags and display these as ‘rich snippets’ on SERPs.

No new coding skills are needed to optimise your website with this extra layer of visibility. Web pages are still marked up with HTML coding but with schema mark-up vocabulary added to the HTML microdata. The new schema vocabulary is an agreed code produced by a collaborative project from search engine giants including Google, Bing and Yahoo.

What are the benefits of schema mark-up?

There are several:

• Attention is drawn to the most relevant result
• Instant relevant additional information is shown in the search result
• Increase click through rates and reduce bounce rate, both helping your site rise through the rankings
• Gives the digital marketer an additional layer of optimisation
• Used alongside your social media tags, schema gives search engine more details about the page contents
• Used with open graph tags it makes your content shareable

This is exactly the type of technique a good SEO firm should be implementing to move your business forward. Edge45® are happy to talk through schema mark-up and the advantages for your business.