How to increase blog traffic with Schema markup

Karmakar

11 years ago

Hi everyone I’m happy to bring to you a wonderful guy from India. Karmakar has a lot to tell us about SEO. He is someone to listing to. He is the author of SEO Beginner 2 Pro, a 547 Page ebook on everything you need to know about Search Engine Optimization and Social Media. This book has contributions from some top expert in the industry. While I recommend you check out this power packed seo ebook, let’s read on to discover what Karmakar has to say on how to increase blog traffic with Schema markup

I am quite sure that if you are a blogger then you must be familiar with the word HTML tags.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language which is the basic unit of websites. The web pages and other information appearing in the browsers are basically written in HTML.

Any file with .html extension is viewed in a web page by the browser.

Simplest ways you can say that HTML tag tells a browser how to display the provided information in the tag.

For example, <h1>Harry Potter</h1> informs the browser to display the given text string “Harry Potter” in a H1 tag.

But, this HTML tag does NOT provide any kind of information about what the meaning of this text string “Harry Potter”.

It could be referring to the successful movie or may be it trying to indicate profile picture of a person or maybe it is just trying to point out the famous book

So, this lack of information can make it very difficult for any search engines crawler to intelligently display relevant content to a user.

Now, Schema.org provides is a collection of shared and common language which webmasters can use to markup their websites in ways that can be understood by all the major search engines like Google or Microsoft or Yahoo.

What is Schema.org?

Schema.org is a Data Markup structure. It is created by the 3 (Three) biggest organizations in the online business and they are:

Google.
Microsoft.
Yahoo

It is a common language supported by all these major search engines.

The main objective behind creating this On-Page markup language is to improve the web performance of a website, provide more appropriate results and offering Maximum benefits to the webmaster.

Why do you create Schema.org?

Having a single vocabulary and markup syntax that is supported by the major search engines means that webmasters do not have to make tradeoffs based on which markup type is supported by which search engine.

With schema.org, webmasters have a single place to go to learn about markup for a wide selection of item types, search engines get structured information that helps improve the search result quality and users end up with better search results and a better experience on the web.

How to mark up your site using schema?

Every web page contains an underlying meaning that readers understand when they read that particular page.

But all the search engines crawlers have a very limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages.

However, if you add an extra tag into the HTML of your web pages which says, “Hello search engine, this particular information describes this specific person or movie or video or place” .

You can get the full attention of the search engines as the communication between your web pages to the search engine crawlers is more descriptive.

Now here comes the most important part of this story; there is a concept called “Micro-data” which is a set of tags, is been introduced with HTML5 which allows you to create the communication bridge with the search engines.

These are main “Micro Data” that you have to use for your Schema.org markup.

Itemscope:

Let’s start with a descriptive example. Just imagine that you have a web page about the famous book “Harry Potter”.

In that case your HTML code might look like this:

<div>

<h1>Harry Potter</h1>

<span>Author: J. K. Rowling (publish: 29 June 1997 – 21 July 2007)</span>

<span>Fantasy, mystery, thriller, fiction</span>

<a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter”>Read Details Here</a>

</div>

Now, we need to identify the section of the page which is “about” the famous book “Harry Potter”.

To identify this, you need to add “itemscope” element to your HTML tag which encloses the information about this item:

<h1>Harry Potter</h1>

<span>Author: J. K. Rowling (Publish: 29 June 1997 – 21 July 2007)</span>

<span>Fantasy, mystery, thriller, fiction</span>

<a href=”…/book/harry-potter-details.html”>Read Details Here</a>

</div>

Next, By adding itemscope, you have specified that the HTML contained in the <div>…</div> block is about a particular item.

But, again it is NOT that much helpful if you are NOT able to specify what kind or type of item it is.

Now, to specify the “Type” of an item you need to use the “itemtype” attribute immediately after the itemscope.

Itemtype:

This particular attribute specifies that the item contained in the <div>… <div> is in fact a “Book”, as defined in the schema.org type hierarchy. Item types are provided as URLs, in this case https://schema.org/Book .

<h1>Harry Potter</h1>

<span>Author: J. K. Rowling (Publish: 29 June 1997 – 21 July 2007)</span>

<span>Fantasy, mystery, thriller, fiction</span>

<a href=”…/book/harry-potter-details.html”>Read Details Here</a>

</div>

Itemprop:

Here comes another important question:

What kind/type of additional information can you provide to search engines about this famous book Harry Potter?

Answer:

Every Book has many interesting properties such as Title, Tag Line, Author, Ratings, Publish date etc.

Now, to mark properties of an item, you can use the itemprop attribute. For example:

If you want to identify the author of a book, add itemprop=”author” to the element enclosing the author’s name.

<h1 itemprop=”name”>Harry Potter</h1>

<span>Author: <span itemprop=”author”>J. K. Rowling</span> (publish: 29 June 1997 – 21 July 2007)</span>

<span itemprop=”genre”>fantasy, mystery, thriller, fiction</span>

<a href=”<a href=”…/book/harry-potter-details.html” itemprop=”details”>Read Details Here</a>

</div>

Please note that I have added additional <span>…</span> tags to attach the itemprop attributes to the appropriate text on the page.

<span> tags do NOT change the way pages are rendered by a web browser, so they are a convenient HTML element to use with itemprop.

How to use Schema.org for a person:

You can use Schema.org for creating your own persona and make yourselves more visible to the readers. If you run your own website and you have “about me” page, you can use this type of HTML coding:

<div>

My name is Sangbaran Karmakar, but friends call me KARMAKAR. You can find more details about me here

<a href=”https://www.myseobenefits.com/about-me”>www.myseobeenfits.com</a>

I am from Kolkata, India and I am the owner of www.myseobenefits.com

I follow:

<a href=”https://www.adriennesmith.net”>Adrienne Smith </a>

<a href=”https://www.basicblogtips.com”>Ileane Smith </a>

<a href=”https://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com”>Ana Hoffman </a>

</div>

Now with Schema.org mark-up:

My Name is <span itemprop=”name”>Sangbaran Karmakar</span>

But friends call me <span itemprop=”nickname”>KARMAKAR</span>

You can find more details about me here:

<a href=”https://www.myseobenefits.com/about-me” itemprop=”url”>www.myseobenefits.com</a>

I am from <span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”https://data-vocabulary.org/Address>

<span itemprop=”locality”>Kolkata</span>,

<span itemprop=”country”>India</span>

</span>

and I am the <span itemprop=”jobtitle”>Owner</span> of <span itemprop=”affiliation”>www.myseobenefits.com</span>

I follow:

<a href=”https://www.adriennesmith.net” rel=”friend”>Adrienne Smith</a>

<a href=”https://www.basicblogtips.com” rel=”friend”>Ileane Smith</a>

<a href=”https://www.trafficgenerationcafe.com” rel=”friend”>Anna Hoffman</a>

</div>

How to use Schema.org for review of product:

If you have a product and you are getting reviews of your clients, you can mark-up all the product details and client review for better CTR:

Let us assume that you are selling this product in your website and you have few ratings and reviews for the product.

With the help of Schema.org mark-up you can describe the details of the product as well as details of the reviews by the customers to the search engines for better understanding of the product and it`s quality.

The Schema.org mark-up for this will look like this:

<span itemprop=”name”>Samsung Galaxy S IV/S4 GT – I9500>

<div itemprop=”AggregateRating”

itemscope itemtype=”https://schema.org/AggregateRating”>

Rated <span itemprop=”RatingValue”>3.7</span>/5

based on <span itemprop=”ReviewCount”>262</span> customer reviews

</div>

</div>

Product Description:

<span itemprop=”description”> Touch screen, 3G Data Capable, 4G Data Capable,

Bluetooth enable, Global Ready, GPS, Internet Browser, Music Player,

QWERTY Keyboard, Wi-Fi Capable</span>

Customer Review:

By <span itemprop=”author”>Maria</span>

<span itemprop=”BestRating”>5</span> Stars

</div>

<span itemprop=”Description”>It is a really Good phone! The Camera is excelent,

but I was expecting 32 GB and this is 16 GB</span>

</div>

How to use Schema.org for Blog-post:

If you have an article and you want to optimize that with the help of Schema.org then it can be done by following way:

I am taking this article example from https://www.myseobenefits.com/12-reasons-why-google-is-essential-for-your-website/

12 reasons WHY Google+ is essential for your website

By KARMAKAR on Feb 26, 2014

This article has been tweeted 5 times and contains 2 user comments.

Now my objective here is to provide as much as structured information possible to the search engine crawler, so that it can understand each and every word on my webpage.

When I am going to mark-up this blog post for better CTR with Schema.org it will look like this:

<h1 itemprop=”name headline”> 12 reasons WHY Google+ is essential for your website</h1>

<a href=”https://plus.google.com/u/0/+SangbaranKarmakar/posts” itemprop=”url” rel=”author”>KARMAKAR</a>

</span>

</div>

<div class=”content” itemprop=”articlebody”>Content…</div>

</div>

Conclusion:

There are many tools available (Free as well as Paid) in the market which can help you to automate your Schema markup process. But unfortunately, they do NOT cover in details markups for each and every item.

Now, if you really want to increase your website`s communication with the search engine, as well as want to increase your visibility in front of the readers then either you copy these codes and use in your HTML tags according to your requirements OR hire someone to do that on behalf of you.

You can find experienced people in places like Elance or Fiverr.

Question:

Will using Schema.org improve your site`s performance in search?

Answer:

Search Engines do NOT use schema markup for ranking purposes at this moment (However, you can expect the news very soon) BUT rich snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, which directly influence the Click Through Rates (CTR); so you will see an increase in your traffic.