Start-ups and small businesses are increasing day by day with the advent of digital innovation and commercialization. The first thing any business needs is a website for an online presence and appropriate marketing for the content.
Now when you think of developing a website, you also think about the type of data you want to put on apart from the developer’s perspective. Many questions come to your mind. What kind of data should you put up on the website? What should be the format of the data? How should you put the data so that your website engages traffic? And so on and so forth.
You might have heard of the use of”structured data” to present your online information in a proper format. No worries if you have not. In this article, Convex Studio will walk you through all the information that you need to know regarding structured data.
What is Structured Data?
A pre-designed model to include data in a specific format is called structured data. You may find it difficult to understand but let’s look at an easy example from daily life. Nowadays, when you shop online for a specific product, you fill out your particulars in specific columns designated for address, name, and contact number instead of just randomly filling in the relevant information. This information from particular columns is gathered as structured data. To be more clear, structured data works like search engine optimization so that data can be easily extracted when needed.
How to Generate Structured Data?
You may wonder how you can add structured data to your website. Structuring of data, sometimes called schema markup, is done by adding in-page markup within the website code. You can acquire the services of marketing experts like Convex Studio to add structured data to your website.
What to Put in Your Structured Data?
You can format your data according to a pre-defined model in various cases. If your website provides a directory, you can use schema markup to annotate specific details. You can also highlight the characteristics of your product or service using the product and offer markup. If you have a cooking blog, you can use recipe markup to showcase ingredients separately. You may also create and schema markup of an article, video, and event by using their respective markups.
How to Make the Right Structured Data for Your Website?
The purpose of formatting the data is to define the content of any page on a specific website. One thing to pay attention to is that not all data can be structured. Here are a few tips on how you should format data into a markup.
- Never create blank pages on your website for the sole purpose of holding your schema markup
- Never add that information into the markup which is not visible to the user no matter how correct it is
- Avoid using complex and ambiguous terms as headings in your schema markup
- Always use explicit terms in your structured format so that search engines can understand your web content
- Always test the compliance and compatibility of your structured data by using tools like Schema, SNIP, WordPress, and others.
Is Structured Data Useful?
When you go online to search for anything, you get millions of results specific to your query within a timeframe of milliseconds. A decade ago, most search results used to be in the form of texts and links. Today’s search results, however, are quite interactive which gather the information you asked for from a bunch of websites and display that in creative ways such as FAQs, local results, infographics etc.
This is possible only when the search engine can understand the data present on your website. A search engine can better understand your data only if it is in a structured format. If you look at it, this is the mode of communication between the search engine and your website.
Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool
Google provides its’ own structured data testing tool to enhance the user experience on your website. The Google Search Rich Test Results have been redirected into a new domain called schema.org which allows you to check the syntax of your schema markup. This tool also requires you to see whether markup complies with the standards of schema.org or not.
Furthermore, Schema allows you to put specific information about your business in structured data. Basics like location, the ‘About Us’ section, brand logo, focal persons to contact etc. This way the knowledge graph of the Google search results is optimized, thus improving the SEO of your website.
How to Increase Traffic to Your Website Using Structured Data?
If you want to increase traffic to your website, you should pay special attention to whether or not your site appears in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Lying on the extreme right-hand side of the results of your search, a Knowledge Graph is available to make it handy for users so that they can analyze their content.
The ranking of a website is linked to how often your web page appears in the search results as provided by search engines. Structured data contributes indirectly to this ranking as it can be incorporated in different ways. One of the common ways is to put structured data in AMP (accelerated mobile pages) of the webpage so that it appears with rich results even faster than others. If that happens, your webpage becomes more optimized in response to the increased search traffic.
Conclusion
Although the business wants to implement structured data into its web development yet fears the ‘coding’ portion of developing an appropriate schema. Difficult or not, it provides a roadmap to success for businesses by enhancing their online presence and outreach.
Convex Studio is a digital marketing agency in Hamilton, that offers the best website design and development services. Leave the technical coding part to us while you enjoy success. Give us a call if you need help!