When it comes to passing information between two systems, data can either be structured or unstructured. Unstructured data is incredibly common on the web and can usually be found in the form of sentences and paragraphs describing an event, a thing, etc. But words used to describe any given item vary site-to-site and author-to-author. Structured data, on the other hand, utilizes a very prescriptive format to describe any given object. For example, any given item offered for sale may have a SKU, sale price, delivery date, and description. This structured data ensures that all items are represented equally and is very efficient for sharing large amounts of data between systems.
Structured data is the use of standardized formats to provide search engines with information on webpage content. When a piece of content on a webpage needs to be representative of a certain “thing” like a recipe, a job posting, or a profile page, the code needs to be structured and marked properly so that the search engine understands the content and context of the page.
This generally takes the form of the “behind the scenes” code that tells search engine crawlers what specific content is on the page. This code enables more informed searches across websites for enhanced results like featured snippets, rich snippets, video carousels and knowledge panels.
Schema.org is an initiative launched in 2011 by Bing, Google, and Yahoo to create a common set of schemas for structured data markup on webpages. Web developers use the standards listed on Schema.org to mark up their pages for enhanced search results.
This project is managed by a large group of interested individuals and chaired by Google. Some industries have even created their own “extensions” so that they can describe their industry-specific content. This type of data tells Google and other search engines detailed information about a page on a website in a way that they can easily understand. And users love the informative and rich results!
Schema.org includes format specifications for over 1,000 types of data. This makes Schema.org the accepted universal vocabulary standard for structured data. And while several technologies have been specified for structured data, Google recommends using JSON-LD which is easily embedded in widgets and HTML pages.
Schema tells the search engines what your data means, not just what it says. It gives the data context. Have you ever searched for something and found your answers even without clicking on any results? This is probably because of structured data.
Structured data is important for SEO because it helps search engines find and understand what your pages and your website are about in order to be shown in search results. This gives more exact results than if various algorithms are trying to understand and contextualize the unstructured data on websites.
Any business can benefit from Schema markup to gain visibility in search engines result pages (SERPs) including local businesses. Attorneys, restaurants, electricians, and more use schema markup to help generate rich snippets. These snippets highlight pertinent parts of their businesses and help bring their pages to the top of a search.
Although structured data can get very complex, with a little training anyone can do it. There are two basic types of structured data, website markup and email markup, and convenient tools can be found on the web to help you generate both.
In this post, we are focusing on the website markup types and highlighting three different schema markup generators: two of them are free and one is not.
This free tool creates structured data markup by highlighting data on a live page and then tagging it. The website type JSON-LD markups include the following types of items: Article, Events, Questions & Answer Page, Job Postings, Local Business, Products, Movies, Restaurants, Book Reviews, Software Applications, Datasets & TV Episodes.
You can create schema for a webpage event with the following steps:
This is a free schema markup generator, which is used to create JSON-LD markups for the following items: Article, Breadcrumb, Event, FAQ Page, How-to, Job Posting, Local Business, Organization (Logo, Contacts, Social Profile), Person (Social Profile, Job Information), Product (Offer, Aggregate Rating, Reviews), Video, Website (Sitelinks Searchbox).
The procedure below also demonstrates how to create schema for a webpage event:
This is a paid suite of tools that allows digital marketers to create and manage Schema markup without requiring them to be an expert in the Schema.org language or code generation. It is an advanced tool, but supports all types of enterprise-grade solutions and works with all websites and all content types.
Schema App offers two different tools for authoring markup:
1. The Schema App Editor — This tool allows you to create custom markup through a form-like interface. It lists all required and recommended properties for a particular Schema.org class (or type) in order to be eligible for rich results, and lists all other properties available to a Schema.org class so that you may add more information to contextualize your data items.
2. The Schema App Highlighter — This tool allows you to create a template for a particular Schema.org type (e.g. a Blog Posting) and deploy it across any number of pages that match the same structure. This means you can create schema markup at scale for hundreds or thousands of pages after only a few minutes of authoring the template.
For comparison sake, we are using the same event type structured data.
For the purpose of simplicity, we are going to use the Merkle Schema Markup Generator free tool and the JSON-LD schema type. Create each type of structured data by entering the type of schema and then add all necessary fields.
Schema is a fantastic tool that helps your website content show up in featured snippets, rich snippets, video carousels and knowledge panels. The results of implementing structured data in your page are not guaranteed, but it is likely that you will gain visibility in the search engines result pages (SERP) and also in the rich results.
