Schema : The One Language That Will Unite Them All

I’m sure before bagels and coffee in the morning you’re hearing the executives, CMO’s, the Board, or maybe even your direct supervisors say “We must optimize our site”. The thought process is: if we optimize the site, then we will get more traffic and thus increase sales. Seems logical, right? Problem is, there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of different tweaks, methodologies, and tactics that are being shouted from the digital rooftops on how to do this. This becomes hurtful instead of helpful when we don’t know who to listen to anymore. As the old adage says, time is money, and honestly who really has the time to review them all systematically to find out what really works?

When every quote-unquote expert says “this is the most effective strategy” it starts to become a guessing game. Of course, if you pick the wrong tactic it could cost your company, or you, quite a lot of money. My advice: remove “expert” commentary and go straight to the source. If you can’t trust the system builders to tell you what they want (which makes their job easier anyway), who can you trust?

Structured Data

An SEO friend of mine told me a joke the other day. He said, “where is the best place to hide a body?” I wasn’t sure where he was going with that… and then he responded “the second page of Google” (Hardy-Har-Har…thanks Jason!). Our businesses, especially e-commerce based businesses, rely heavily on our search engine placement. Looking over some accounts, I’ve noticed that a position drop from 10 to 11 on Google can decrease traffic by 70%! (No business should rely so heavily on one keyword- but that is a whole other article-stay tuned). With this reliance on targeted search traffic, we have to make sure that our websites not only look good (for user experience) but can be understood by Googlebot or any other spider. The best way for spiders to understand what our website is about is through the use of structured data.The need for recognizable ontology (naming conventions) has led to the birth of Schema.org

Schema.org

On June 2, 2011 Schema.org was born through a collaboration of Google, Yahoo, and Bing (Yandex joined in November). Together they came up with the ultimate “best practices” guide to allow structured data to be properly crawled by search engine spiders. The primary focus is on using microdata markup to create a common vocabulary between all search engines. This helps site owners who are trying to be seen by search engines to use one major optimization technique. This in turn leads to becoming indexed by all 3 SERPs, instead of having to tailor a site just to Google or Bing.

Implementing Schema Markup

With all that said, I am sure you are wondering “how” to actually do this. If you have a Wordpress site there are some great plugins that make it pretty straight-forward. The ones that I am currently testing out are:

• Raven’s Schema Creator
• All in One Schema.org

If you don’t have a Wordpress site, or if you just want to play around with schema further, the following sites are both useful.

• SEO Chat
• Micro Data Generator

If you don’t want to use a tool and prefer to hand code everything, then I would recommend visiting Raven’s “SEO Guide to Schema.” There are some great in depth articles that can help you gain a much deeper understanding of Schema.

Was there any other information that I should have covered, or that you would like to contribute? Have you used Schema markup on your site? If so, have you noticed any significant lift in traffic or rankings?