Google’s Webmaster Tools contains all sorts of useful information. One of these bits of useful information is the link under Search Appearance called Structured Data. As we all know, content is king, and most of us try to have great content on our websites. However, it is possible to have a web page with great content but structured in such a way that the search engines can not figure out the main point of the page.
Structured data allows you to mark up your content to show the search engines what is what. And the best part of all is that the major search engines (Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo! ) are working together! Using the schema.org vocabulary you can make sure search engines (and more) can understand important parts of your content.
For example, here’s a set of common items that could use this new markup method:
At Tybee Web Design we used the tools at google webmaster tools to guide us and added some markup to our home page to let the search engines know our name and location using the local business schema. You can basically do whatever is right for your business since there are many, many item types within many different data types.
When analyzing our page’s structured data the first thing we noticed was our page did not have an author, so we let google know who the author was by linking to our google + page. Things like keywords are diminishing in importance for page ranking – good, structured content will always be the best way to promote your site. What authorship can do is start to categorize and understand who creates data and allow the search engines to more effectively serve up the right site based on user’s search terms. Maybe it is not as important for a service website to have an author but if you have a blog it makes a lot of sense. Search algorithms change all the time and claiming authorship can possible lead to a higher ranking, which leads to greater exposure, traffic and more money.
Also, adding authorship gets you a rich snippet in google. This seems good for business and pretty cool, right?
Our focus here at Tybee Web Design is creating sites that are easy for the client to use and sites that can easily be found. The algorithms for search engines will always be changing but they will always be trying to find the best result for an individual’s search. So if you continue to create great content and structure it so that it works for the major search engines you have a great chance of getting found on the web.
For more in depth information on structured take a look at www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-use-schema-markup-for-local-seo. Here at Tybee Web Design we will continue to follow all the major search engines and keep up with changes so that you can ensure your website is positioned as well as it can be.