Using Markup or Tags to Signal Website Data Structure
Using Markup or Tags to Signal Website Data Structure
If you have a website that uses any kind of structured data, then this article is for you. Not sure what structured data is? Here’s a short explanation:
An eCommerce store website usually has a structured way to display its products. A typical product has a price field, a title field, a short description field etc, and usually those elements are placed in the page based on a layout template. Other examples of a website pages that has regular layouts could be a blog post page, or maybe a review page, or a job listing page and so on. Search engines are very good at figuring out what kind of website you have and whether your pages form some kind of set, but sometimes it’s best not to rely on chance to have each of the fields in templated pages identified as what you intend them to be. If, for example, you are a regular blogger about movies or TV shows and write a post and a review on each that you have watched. Your blog post will probably have a title that reflects the movie or TV show name. You probably list the director, screenwriter, etc. You may also note running time, episodes, and a review score measured in stars or points of some sort. To ensure each of these elements are recognised by search engines for what they are, you need some kind of signal.