Structured Data | Schema.org | Lesson 31/34 | SEMrush Academy

Key Takeaways

so in this lesson we're talking about structured data and the general idea behind structured data is that it can extend regular html and give more context and meaning to other content that is already available on the site let's say a website has a zip code on it so this could be in fact also a very long house number or even a short phone number if you look at the numbers themselves it is hard to tell if this is in fact a house number so numbering systems can vary from country to country the idea behind structured data is to use existing information in within html and then to extend it essentially giving more meaning to this number and markup that this is in fact a house number thus the crawler can understand you know what the specific text string is and what it's all about the most well-known type of structured data is schema.org an initiative that google bing yahoo and nowadays yandex are involved in there are also other structured data formats facebook for example has open graph tags twitter has what's called twitter cards there's json ld which is javascript object notation for linked data and which is kind of a bit of a cryptic format at least for the non-technical marketers there are also all the types of structured data for example micro formats and rdfa and different types of variations of it so the concept is generally all the same the goal is to give more meaning to different things on the website and to make it easier for machines not only crawlers but also you know for example screen readers to make this content easy to understand the idea behind schema.org is to provide different types of annotations for different types of content on a website so say if you're going to embed objects like audio files or a video then there is a schema markup of an audio object or of a video object respectively for it we can describe you know the content in those different files in a way that actually machines can read it and provide way more detail from a more practical perspective let's assume you have content for an event on your site so you can use the event markup to provide more machine readable content you know such as for example we have the events location or you can mark up the events time or other events that are going to happen for example in the same region or you know where those events are actually going to happen etc etc so you essentially structure these details for a machine to be able to understand them this is done by extending your already existing html markup and it's actually very simple to do you should go to schema.org to see what schema markup is actually available for specifically your content and your industry there are lots of useful things already at your disposal say you work in the farmer or the healthcare industry there are definitions for you know medical and health entities but also you could you know mark up symptoms treatments so they can be outlined in way more detail there's a product markup you know for e-commerce sites and local businesses including all sorts of different informations about the organization themselves like opening times or the location any type of creative work you know if we talk about say movies or books etc they can be described using schema markup as well all of it is there so you just have to understand you know what fits with your content once you have implemented schema markup make sure that you test it properly in google search console there's the structures data testing tool it takes your html extracts all the schema markup from the site and displays the output on the right hand column that section shows you you know what it has found how they could process it and if everything has been implemented correctly and according to the correct standards generally speaking the tool tells you if the schema annotations are valid or not if not the chances that google will consider your markup are close to zero invalid markup doesn't help so again really make sure that you test it properly in google search console there's also what's called the structured data tab which is kind of for this continuous monitoring where you can you know have validation errors and how they develop over time keep a close eye on that to ensure that you know for example when you update your website that the markup hasn't been broken changes to html can often result in markup not validating anymore which is not what you want one schema markup type that deserves specific mention is called speakable this can help screen readers and audio devices you know for example google home or amazon's alexa to understand which content on a website is relevant for those types of devices so you know imagine you have a very long article and your website comes up as the result often it's very hard for those devices to understand and determine which section they should read and therefore return to their users so with speakable you can mark up you know sections or a paragraph on a page or in an article and these are the parts that machines will consider reading to the person who perform the search query or the voice search in that matter please understand this markup is currently pending review but i think it's super super exciting especially if you care about voice search and the results that you're serving to your users