When search engine giants all club together to make an announcement then you don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that the subject of the announcement is something that will affect rankings. In this case it is the announcement that they are all supporting schema.org.
The more a search engine understands the data that is being presented to it on a page the better it can index that data which in turn allows the search engine to provide better results when you carry out a search. Often when data is stored in a database it is in a very structured format, the kind that search engines adore. However, when the data is formatted onto a webpage then this structure is lost. If there was a way for a search engine to still be able to acce3ss this structured data then it would make data analysis more accurate and this is where schema.org comes in.
The intention of schema.org is to provide site owners with a series of tags and mark-ups that when used on web pages can be easily understood by search engines. At the moment there are schemas for:
- CreativeWork,
- Book
- Movie
- MusicRecording
- Recipe
- TVSeries
- AudioObject
- ImageObject
- VideoObject
- Event
- Organization
- Person
- Place
- LocalBusiness
- Restaurant
- Product
- Offer
- AggregateOffer
- Review
- AggregateRating
The basis of scemas is the itemscope element and this needs to be added to the HTML tag that encloses the data that we are highlighting to the search engine. There is also an item type which will be one of those listed above. Each item type can have a number of properties that are referred to in the syntax as “itemprop”.
I have had a little play today and created some data for my contact page using the following code:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Person”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Michael Walmsley<br/></span>
<img src=”http://www.mickwalmsley.com/media/michael_walmsley_website_designer.jpg” itemprop=”image” align=”right” />
<span itemprop=”jobTitle”>Freelance Web Designer<br/></span>
<span itemprop=”telephone”>0800 779 7829<br/></span>
<a href=”mailto:mick@mickwalmsley.co.uk” itemprop=”email”>
mick@mickwalmsley.co.uk</a><br/>
Michael’s home page: <a href=”www.mickwalmsley.com” itemprop=”url”>mickwalmsley.com</a>
</div>
From the above code you can see that I have identified myself to be of type “person” and that the properties I have used are:
- Name
- Image
- Job Title
- Telephone
- URL
This should help any bot that crawls my site to index my data as it can clearly identify key elements that help to describe me. You can see how the data looks by visiting the contact page of my website.
I have only just started to scratch the surface of schema’s in this article. They will become increasingly important to Google, Bing and Yahoo in the coming months and years and so it will be a topic you will really need to understand in order to attain the highest rankings possible for your website.
I would recommend that you check out the schema.org website or if you would like personal advice on the subject then feel free to call me on 0800 779 7829 to discuss your requirements.