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.
There are two ways you can address this issue:
You can use Schema markup to tag your data so that it is identified according to a predefined list of formats. Information on how to implement Schema markup on your website is available on http://schema.org.
For Google search, you can use the Data Highlighter tool available in Google Search Console to begin mapping fields in your website against template fields in Google’s search engine.
Schema Markup:
Implementing Schema markup can be complicated for most website owners. It’s something that you’d most likely have to ask your web developer to do for you. If you are using a page template for your posts or pages in which you plan to place structured data, they might be added there as a ‘one-off’ and need to be built in a way such that future updates of your website theme software do not overwrite them back to the original unmodified states. One advantage of Schema markup is that you do not have to place it in a page template if you know how to implement it ad-hoc. You can simply tag the elements present in your page via HTML code, but you will need to know how a well-formed tag should look, and have access to the code version of your page content. As an example, WordPress websites offer access to the code content of each page via the page editor.
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