Structured Data: Improve your SEO
Structured Data: Improve your SEO
What is structured data
Structured data is one of the most important tools available to you today to help search engines understand your web site content more effectively and improve your SEO. Structured data simply means data that is organized in an understandable way. Google, Bing, Yandex and other search engines encourage webmasters to use them and in return provide specific benefits.
Benefits of using structured data
Rich search results
It concerns the appearance of rich content in the organic results of the search engines. That is, in addition to the title and description (title and meta description) may additionally appear photos, additional information (eg address, contact numbers, products and services), as well as visual enhancements that will make your organic result more attractive, fact which will lead to more clicks on it.
Rich cards
It is a variation of rich search results for mobile phone users.
Enriched search results
It is about the presence of interactive elements that make your organic result more attractive.
Knowledge Graph Card
Using structured data increases the chances of your brand being included in Google’s Knowledge Graph Card which appears to the right of its organic results.
Breadcumbs
Display of the “path” that leads to the specific page that appears in the organic results.
Carousels
Appearances of photos or videos in sequence, in the organic results, that for example relate to products of your website.
Image packs
Appearances of your website photos in Image packs that are often included in the organic results.
All these enhanced presentations of your website will lead to more clicks which in turn will increase its traffic and improve its CTR (Click-Through-Rate), which is an important parameter for improving its ranking.
The most commonly used structured data
There is a significant range of cases in which structured data can be implemented. Let’s see now what are the most used.
Local Business
It concerns the local companies with local SEO that the user of the search engines will search usually using a geographical designation, for example, a physician in Athens, an architect in Paris, a veterinarian in Chicago, etc. In this structured data can be placed information about the type of local business, the contact details per case (eg for sales, for general information, for technical issues), its logo, its days and hours of operation, its photos, the currencies it trades, the payment methods it accepts, etc.
Products
In case you have an e-shop, these are the most important structured data for you. You will apply them to all your products and you will include in them information such as, the name of your specific product, its photo, its price, its availability, its manufacturer, the user evaluation, its description, the its raw materials, its code, the category to which it belongs, etc.
Article
It’s about your blog articles, which every website should have. For each article you will state its title, description, author, date of publication, photo, publisher, etc.
Recipes
Due to the high interest shown by internet users for recipes, these structured data were among the first to be created. So if your website is about them, use the information such as the title of each recipe, its photos, its creator, the date it was published, its description, its preparation time, its cooking time, its category , its components, its evaluations, etc.
Technical issues
There are three structured data formats supported by search engines, Microdata, JSON-LD and microformats and two common vocabularies that can be used with them: Schema.org and Microformats.org. Google recommends Schema.org + JSON-LD.
They are placed in the <head> of the corresponding pages. It is very important to note the following: the information we give to structured data should be derived from the information of the corresponding pages, otherwise it is considered a bad practice by Google. To create them you can use online resources such as the Schema Markup Generator.
They can be placed either directly in the code of your website or through Google Tag Manager. Once you have created them you can check their syntax with the Google Structured data checking tool.
See more about SEO and Google:
- Ποιος είναι ο στόχος της κατασκευής μιας ιστοσελίδας σήμερα;
- Πόσες κατηγορίες αναζητήσεων υπάρχουν στις μηχανές αναζήτησης;
- Πόσο ασφαλές είναι το site σας;
- Πόσο επηρεάζει ο κώδικας του site σας στο SEO;