In this new article, our experts discuss the topic of structured data and its role in increasing your traffic and contributing to a semantically enriched web.
The Semantic Web and Structured Data
The notion of semantic web refers to a vision of the web in which computers would be able to analyze all data and their relationships.
Structured Data is code in a specific format, written in such a way that search engines understand it. They read the code and use it to display search results in a specific and much richer way. You can therefore provide clear information about the meaning of a page by adding structured data to it.
Structured data is information that will allow the robots of the different search engines to better understand the content of your website.
For example, a recipe page containing valid structured data is likely to appear in a search result with an image, as shown below:
How to place structured data on your website?
– The markup formats:
To get richer results, you need to add structured data markup to your web pages that search engines will be able to interpret and understand. They may then decide to display them as enriched results in the SERPs.
Note that there are three structured data formats supported by search engines:
– RFDa
– Microdata
– JSON-LD
The RDFa and Microdata formats allow these structured data to be integrated into the HTML code of the page and are conceptually similar.
As for the JSON-LD format, it is a bit different because it forms a block of code to be inserted in the header of a page, which makes it easier to write and maintain. This is why it is generally advisable to use JSON-LD.
– The integration of structured data:
If you use WordPress as a CMS, you could use a specific extension. There are several of them:
– Schema,
– Schema App Structured Data,
– WP SEO Structured Data Schema…
Most of these plugins focus on the main types of structured data: organizations, articles, events, products…
Usually, just select the category that corresponds to your page and fill in the data. The Schema App Structured Data extension takes care of creating your structured data based on the existing information on your site.
So, if your site does not work under WordPress, Google offers you a solution thanks to its dedicated tool to add structured data to your pages:
- Just go to the tool and select the “website” tab.
- Then choose the type of data your page corresponds to and then copy and paste the URL of your page or your HTML code.
- Click on “start tagging”.
- On the left hand side of the screen you will have your page and on the right hand side you will have the structured data to fill in.
- Select the corresponding data on your page or add it manually.
- Once you have made the correspondences, click on “create HTML code”.
- By default, you will get the code corresponding to the data structured with JSON-LD markup.
- You are going to copy this code and paste it instead of the source code of the web page concerned.
- Repeat this operation for each page to which you want to associate structured data.
Why integrate structured data into your web pages?
With structured data, you can “talk” to search engines.
Let’s take the example of a search for a recipe for chocolate mousse, thanks to structured data you can:
– tell the search engines which ingredients are in your recipe
– tell them the preparation time
– tell them how many calories it will contain.
These rich snippets (corresponding to the additional information displayed in a search result) are very useful to the Internet user who is looking for answers to his questions. They will therefore tend to focus more on these results. Indeed, this data will change the way your pages appear in the search results.
Google can then use this information to create rich and informative search results.
Impact of structured data on SEO
Structured data is important for SEO but does not directly affect SEO, but rather the click rate. Indeed, an enriched result is more likely to generate a better CTR and reduce the bounce rate.
Not only does structured data allow search engines to better understand your site and what your content “means”, but it also changes the way your search results are displayed in SERPs.
Search engines are constantly developing new ways to improve the presentation of results. This is the reason why they have gone from a simple list of blue links to pages full of useful information.
To give search engines the ability to display them, you need to add structured data to your website. In addition, this data determines how your snippet will look. It will show more information to your client, which will increase the likelihood that a visitor will click on your results. More clicks will eventually lead to higher rankings!
PLEASE NOTE: Even if your shop meets all the technical criteria for structured data, Google remains the sole decision-maker on whether or not to display it in search results. In general, Google considers many criteria such as page quality when deciding whether or not to display this data.
We hope this article has helped you understand the concept of structured data. You can now optimize your SEO. Do not hesitate to contact us for more information: https://eminence.ch/contact-agence-marketing-geneve