John Philip Argonia

What is Schema.org? Schema.org is a great tool for SEO because of its schema markup database. It is essentially a structured markup that helps major search engines understand information and web pages, thus, providing more plentiful and richer search results. It is also a collaborative effort of the community to maintain a structured schema for everyone and everything on the internet. Search engines such as Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! have been collaborating with Schema.org since 2011 to create high quality search results for us to enjoy.  How is it important for SEO? It is a very useful tool for SEO since it helps search engines interpret vague content. It provides context to what may seem otherwise an ambiguous website or webpage. By Schema.org’s definition:  “Most webmasters are familiar with HTML tags on their pages. Usually, HTML tags tell the browser how to display the information included in the tag. For example, Avatar tells the browser to display the text string “Avatar” in a heading 1 format. However, the HTML tag doesn’t give any information about what that text string means—“Avatar” could refer to the hugely successful 3D movie, or it could refer to a type of profile picture—and this can make it more difficult for search engines to intelligently display relevant content to a user.” It removes any conflicting information that search engines may misunderstand, and thus, provide healthier search results. For example, Google’s search engine interprets the context of a search query and with that information, determines the quality of a search result. With the schema markup, the context of these results will be clear and rid of any information or data that may appear cryptic to the search engine.  Will Schema.org improve my search rankings? There isn’t any solid data or study that supports the idea of schema markup boosting search rankings. Although that may be the case, it still makes your high quality content/rich snippets appear more often in search results. It has also been verified that adding schema markups to your pages increase click through rates (CTR) which in the long term, will be valuable for SEO. Right now, less than one-third of websites and pages make use of the schema markup. This gives you an advantage and a huge window of opportunity to discover the potential of your website with this tool.  Conclusion Schema.org and the schema markup may appear daunting at first as some individuals might see it as a tool that is meant for big companies and major search engines, but that is totally not the case. Schema.org was invented for users, hence why it is a community effort to create and maintain. It can be used for businesses, articles, book reviews, products, and many more. It is a very strong tool that any local SEO who wishes to improve their rankings should be utilizing to its full potential.