How to Use Schema Markup to Boost Your SEO Organic Traffic

With millions of websites available across the internet, having your website found is a huge task. 

This makes it mandatory for you to make your website search engine optimized so that it can appear at the top of the search results. There are many techniques that you can apply to boost the SEO organic traffic of your website. Would you have tried looking for such techniques, you would have surely come across schema markup. Schema markup is more effective than most other techniques available today, but it is not being used that often.

The name might frighten you if you are a non-technical person and you might also feel that it requires some technical knowledge to implement it on your website. But, guess what? It is not so difficult to understand and implement; more than that it can immediately boost your SEO organic rank.

What is Schema Markup?

Schema Markup is metadata about the content on your website that helps the search engine understand your website better. The search engine has the content on your website, but it cannot understand the meaning you want to convey; not really. It just looks for certain phrases and tries to match them with the search query. Now, by using schema markup you can explicitly tell what part of the website is conveying what meaning. This will make it easier for the search engines to produce search results and so, your website will be a hit.

To implement Schema Markup, you do not need to learn some new language or work on your coding skills. The web pages that have schema markup are developed using HTML only. But, now there is only one difference that you need to add some words from schema.org to your simple HTML page. schema.org has got some standard markers that can be used in your HTML that will help the search engine in understanding your website better. Schema Markup was actually developed for the users to gain insight on the content of your website before having to open it and go through the trouble of understanding on their own. There are markers available for several types of content: Articles, Events, Movies, Reviews, Ratings, TV Episodes, Products, etc. You can use them according to the type of content available on your website.

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Before we get into knowing how to use schema markup on your website, let us look at an example of a tag wherein a schema marker is used.

<div itemscopeitemtype=”http://schema.org/Event”>…</div>

Here, Event is the marker used from schema.org and it tells us that there is an event description in this ‘div’ tag.

How to use Schema Markup on your website?

Step 1: Go to Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

There will be several options for you to select from for the type of data on your website.

Step 2: Select the type of content you have on your website

From the list available, select the one that suits your website’s content.

Step 3: Provide your website’s URL

In the text-box located at the bottom of the form, enter the exact URL of the website you want to add markers to. Then, click on the ‘Start Tagging’ button. This will open the workspace of the markup tool where you need to carry on with the next phase.

Step 4: Select the elements from the website to be marked

Highlight the elements from the left side of the screen which has the website opened. You can add a tag for elements such as the name of the website, author, the date of publish, the ratings, article heading, article body, etc.

Step 5: Select the type of tag

After having highlighted the element from the left side, you need to select the type of the element from the tags available in the right pane.

Step 6: Adding tags

Repeat the previous two steps of highlighting and adding tags until you have satisfactorily marked all the elements you should have.

Step 7: Create an HTML

After having added all the tags for the elements, click on the ‘Create HTML’ button. This will open a new HTML script with the data same as your website, but here there will also be the metadata that you have just added in the previous steps.

Step 8: Add this code to your website

The only thing you now need to do is add this script to your website to reflect the changes you just did. The schema markup is now added to your website.

Step 9: Testing

Now, to be sure those things have been done correctly; test your website using the Structured Data Testing Tool. After opening the tool, select one of the two options – Fetch URL or Code Snippet. The Fetch URL option will allow you to test a website that is already running live, while by using Code Snippet, you can get the schema markup preview. The tool will recommend you more tags that are required or those that might have been added incorrectly. It will show appropriate warnings and errors.

Having followed these nine steps, you have added schema markup to your website. Now, let us look at the advantages of using schema markup.

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By adding schema markup, it is statistically proven that your SEO rank goes up by at least 4 places; but this is not guaranteed. But, this certainly improves the chances of your website being clicked. And keep it clear in your mind that having a good organic rank is nit the ultimate goal. The goal should be to have more hits on your website. Imagine you entered a query and found many results. The first one is plain and the second one has got certain tags and pictures. You are going to click on the second one. So, the rank did not matter here as the second one was more appealing.

Now that you have learned about how to use schema markup, what its benefits are, let us look at how to use it to boost your organic SEO ranking.

• Observe your competitors’ work

Keep observing the changes that are being brought up on your competitors’ websites. That will give you an insight into what changes you need to bring to come out better than them.

• Segregate your pages into priorities

You might already have a high-volume website that is to be schema marked-up. So, doing it for every single page will take a long time. Instead, prioritize the pages and then start with the ones that have higher priority. This will ensure the work is being done effectively and simultaneously, you will start seeing results too.

• Add reviews
  

Having reviews markup added to your website will make it more credible. People will get to know how others are feeling about your website and so, their chances of opening your website will be affected by the reviews too.

Thus, you should now be clear with what schema markup is, how to use it, and how to benefit from it. So, use schema markup to boost the SEO organic traffic on your website. 

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