What is structured Data for SEO How it is beneficial for doing SEO
The SEO world is discussing Structured data for several years. At the time of implementing this, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex together think that it makes a great change in SEO. However, a very small percentage of people use structured data for SEO purposes. The reason is the lack of knowledge about it.
Along with structured data, you might hear some words like schema.org, microformats, microdata, etc. The majority of people don’t really know the distinction and similarities between these.
In this article, we are going to answer some of your common questions. For example, what do you mean by structured data? How to implement it How structured data favor your SEO?
Structured data is any content that is in an organized form. If you have contents of irregular format, arranging it into understandable tabular form can be considered as an organized one.
Consider an example given below:
Following are some kind of text notes;
morning 7 am Gym
9 A. M breakfast
reach the office at 10 a.m
It is just some text that says the morning schedule of someone. Now I am going to organize this data in a structured manner.
| Time | Action | Venue |
|---|---|---|
| 7 A. M | Morning Exercise | at Gym |
| 9 A. M | Conference Call | At home |
| 10 A.M | Seminar Presentation | at New Town Auditorium |
Now, it becomes ordered and structured. When it comes to SEO, structured data is the implementation of some type of markup for the web page. And it provides some additional information about that particular page to users. This markup helps search engines to better understand the purpose of that page.
We can use different methods to implement data. Before getting into it, you must be aware of the term called Vocabulary. Vocabulary is some concept and its relationship describes some areas of concern.
Vocabulary is the common words or phrases used inside the Structured data language. Nothing more, but you will clear this on the way. There is some syntax that is commonly supported by search engines.
They are microdata, JSON-LD, microformats, and two common vocabularies are known as Schema.org and Microformat.org. Schema.org is a vocabulary that supports the Markup of structured data in an HTML document. However, schema.org can be used either with microdata or JSON-LD syntaxes.
Microformat is a vocabulary and markup syntax too. In other words, a microformat is a method of adding semantic information to an HTML document. And it uses some defined markup structure that relies on the HTML attributes.
I hope now you have got some idea about Structured data and Vocabulary. Because the most commonly used vocabulary to markup your website is Schema.org. And some websites are using Microformats.org.Thus, you can use different syntaxes with these vocabularies.
Such as, for schema.org the better way to add a markup to your site is using either microdata or JSON-LD syntaxes. Using Microdata markup we can integrate the structured data into the main HTML of the Page. Whereas, JSON-LD uses JavaScript objects to add markups to the head of the HTML page.
For SEO, the microdata approach is the most recommended one, but Google improved their JSON-LD in past years and hence JSON-LD took lead over microdata. But Bing does not support JSON-LD.
Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines promote the use of Structured data and utilize the benefit from it, by implementing properly. And the main benefit includes search result enhancement like rich snippets, rich cards, carousels, knowledge boxes, etc.
And providing deep information about the website. As I mentioned earlier a well-organized data display your page in front of search engines with much more accurate information about the content of your web page.
Rich search results include enhancement of image and other contents to understand by search engines.
The rich card is a variation of rich search results. And designed for mobile users.
Enriched search results It includes interactive features
Knowledge Graph Provide information about a brand or a product.
Breadcrumbs For added attraction and enhancement of your result view.
Carousels Multiple results are visible in search results in a carousel style.
AMP AMP Pages have appeared in carousels with rich results for mobile users.
Try to read How web Design Affect SEO to know more about the organized manner of the website.