An Awesome Video from Yoast Structured Data
Below is a simple video from Yoast explaining what structured data and what adding structured data looks like in the search results. If you need any professional help with adding structured data to your website, please feel free to contact Whitefish Marketing on 01303 720 288. We offer a free and no-obligation consultation discovery call to see how we can help improve your online marketing strategy. Now… onwards with the video!!
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsACKN3Up9g
“Hi, have you ever heard about structured data, schema.org and JSON-LD? And do you know what they have to do with SEO? Structured data is becoming more and more important in SEO and if you want to compete in the search results, you need to know what this is. So in this video will explain what it all means. So let’s start with a few examples. Have you ever seen search results like these? Do you see how they look different from normal search results which just have a URL, breadcrumbs, a title, and a meta description? These results have images showing you delicious balls of guacamole and they also show the ratings of these recipes, the number of reviews and how long it will take you to make this. This looks tempting. I want to click this. It’s way more enticing than a block of text, right?
These results are called rich results, and there are many types of rich results. For example, rich results can show videos, events, product information, FAQs, news articles, how to’s, job postings, and more. And to get rich results like this, you need to add structured data to your website. So what is structured data? Well, that’s a piece of code written in a specific format and its goal is to help search engines or platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, or Twitter to understand the content of a page. Let’s say you go to this page and a quick scan gives you an idea that this is a review of a game called Eliza. You can also easily make sense of the context. You see that this article was written by a certain author for example, and you see the images and you understand that these are screenshots of the game. So you understand the content and the context just by reading a few lines of plain English language texts or seeing some images. A computer does not understand language or content the way we do.
That’s why it needs some extra support. It needs to be told, “Hey, what you see on the page is a review of a game. Here is the title of the review and this is his alter.” These images are taking from the game that’s reviewed and so on and so forth. By adding structured data, you help computers understand the content of a page. Basically, structured data is metadata that you can add to the code of the page to describe the content of the page. It’s a way to talk to Google and other search engines in a language they understand. And since you add this metadata to the code, normal users do not see it, but machines like search engines do. They see it and read it and then use it to show their users all kinds of things about your product or your website. Let’s dive a bit deeper into how this works.
We’ve seen that to be able to talk to search engines, you need to speak their language and therefore, four big search engines, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex have [inaudible] developed a project called schema.org. On schema.org, you can find all the structured data markups supported by these search engines. Markup? What does that mean? Well, that’s just a way to write code. So basically, schema.org is a large collection of pieces of code and you can use that code to communicate with the search engines about to content on your site. You can use schema.org to find a markup you need for your particular page. For instance, if you offer products on your site, shoes for example, you could show the search engines the color of your shoes, the brand, the price, and how people have rated them. And then the search engines can use that information to show in the search results.
There are loads of examples. If you host events, you can use schema to show the search engines when and where the event will take place. If you sell books, you can add the markup to point the author, the ISBN and the abstract. If you publish blog posts on your blog, you can tell Google who the author is and when they were published. There is structured data for almost everything. Now, let’s get a bit further into the markup, the way of writing code. On schema.org, you’ll find different kinds of markups, micro data, RDFa and JSON-LD. Let’s take a quick peek at the different markups. Here, you can see an example of a recipe without markup. So this is just plain text. It has a title, an author, an image, some nutrition facts, the ingredients, and the instructions. We can understand this text and distinguish the different elements, but it’s not translated into the language search engines understand.
Now, here you can see the same recipe with micro data markup. And this is what the RDFa markup looks like. And last but not least, here’s the same recipe with JSON-LD markup. With markup like this, search engines can also find out what all these elements mean, like which ingredients you need to make this recipe and how many calories the banana bread will contain. At Yoast, we advise you to use the JSON-LD because other markups are more likely to break your site. Plus, it’s the code format that Google likes best. So why is structured data crucial for SEO? Well, structured data makes it easier for search engines to understand what your pages and your website are about. Search engines need to find out what your side is about to show it in the search results.
So, usually structured data is like talking to the search engines and telling them what your site is about and that will help with your rankings. But as we’ve seen, structured data can also change the way your search results look and by adding structured data, your search results could show more information to your users, and this will make your search results stand out, and it will increase the likelihood a customer will click on your results and more clicks will lead to more traffic and eventually lead to higher rankings.
Structured data is getting more important by the day and there’s no sign of it stopping. It might even be the other way around. The adoption of structured data will speed up. Every major search engine now looks at structured data and uses it to power new ways of presenting the information. It’s still picking up steam. So if you’re not yet on the structured data train, get on here and you might still have a good chance of getting a head start on your competitors.”
