How Embellishing Structured Data with JASON-LD Snippets Directs and Helps Search Engines

Shikha SaxenaDec 9, 2020 · 5 min read

Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

Answers to many questions related to SEO and its importance, Tools and Techniques behind the optimization of web pages, the importance of structured data, schema mark-up format and working of search engines, to furnish the search results on SERPs are no more any secrets.Here you may know in one small writeup, as how embellishing structured data with JSON-LD (Java Script Object Notation for Linked Data) rich snippets directs and helps search engines.

On a personal level you may go in detail to find answers to all your queries related to SEO. Here are the few points to know in nutshell:

Importance of organic search traffic

Organic traffic is the audience traffic who come to your website, by typing a query on the Google and clicking on your website listing in search results. Anytime someone land to your website by Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), contribute towards being organic traffic.

Many marketers and website owners pay to bring traffic to their websites and hence they play by Pay Per Click (PPC) rule, but the charm of natural, organic traffic is great. As, if you stop paying, your visibility will go off. But this is not the case with organic traffic.

The content, the keywords used and the intelligent SEO techniques save you money and your pages will stand out in SERPs. Social media marketing and brand building will add on to the results. Organic Traffic audiences are more attentive visitors. Organic traffic gives you better credibility and genuineness to the content.

Multiple pages with same keyword stand out as carousel in SERPs

Product carousal came to market as early as 2014. But little is known about its usage and how to optimize it. Proper carousal optimization can help in converting the article into action. For example enabling people to access your content through voice assistant. One such app for iOS and Android is “Shazam” utilizing music snippets to identify song, music. artist, lyrics and videos. That is amazing!!

Web pages shine out

Web pages stand/shine out if they include range of content as reviews, job listings, local businesses, events, products, courses and eCommerce in their rich snippets of structured data in main content.

Structured Data (SD) send signal to the search engines

Structured Data (SD) embellished with rich snippets, send signal to the search engines, to understand your page and help it to rank better, for relevant terms on page. Rich snippets are reusable programming codes, source codes or machine codes or text, that help to show up the webpages during search with the relevant keywords also coded in snippets. This generate an indirect SEO that enables webpages to become more indexable and provide more accurate and targeted metadata.

Rich snippets increase organic clicks and CTR as they draw the attention from normal listings

Rich snippets are enhanced search results that adds additional information to the plain text as the review ratings , cooking time, opening and closing time of a business, reviews , food calorie value which audience can pick up easily from main content and make up their minds fast. Rich snippets have higher Click Through Rates (CTR) as people get more information about certain things they find enriching. This in turn increases the traffic towards certain webpage.

Rich snippets make the search results more engaging, increase their visibility, fast decision maker and dynamic.

How to incorporate structured data on web pages

Follow step wise process to mark up and embellish semi structured data on the webpages:

  1. Make use of Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.

2. Select your Data type as articles, reviews, events, movies products and so on and enter URL

3. Highlight page elements you want to tag and assign the data tags.

4. Create the HTML microdata and select it.

5. Include this microdata in your webpage text.

6. Test your mark up with Google’s Structured data testing tool.

SD Taxonomy (schema.org) and syntax (JSON-LD)

Structured data-Structured Data have always been an integral part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), though in last 3–4 years, it has evolved manifolds.

Three parts of the website: text, mark-up and the structured data makes it possible for Google and other search engines to efficiently crawl on website and decipher details.

Details are about content, marked up data and how it should look like and finally the information about data, as what it is all about, whether it is a review, FAQs, a product, a course or a business and so on.

Structured Data Taxonomy is the art of naming objects and entities, assigning classes and attributes, collecting information and preparing Knowledge base. It also allows different systems containing these rich context and interlinked attributes to communicate with each other forming a rich knowledge base and knowledge graphs.

Schema.org and Schema Tools

Schema is a cognitive framework or the method to give structure, arrange, organize and interpret the vast amount of unstructured information. Making useful interpretation of the information available around in digital environment, in a short and quick manner. Three schema types are Physical, Logical and View schema.

Schema in Psychology refers to the organization of knowledge gained throughout the years by an individual right from birth- onwards and making use of this knowledge to guide them in life’s cognitive processes and behaviors.

This helps in getting smarter, in decision making, in learning and becoming more intelligent in life processes.

Schema.Org is a site and community activity contribution, mostly be Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Yandex. Their search engines used this data on webpages to get direction.

It is a set of schemas to enable webmasters and web enthusiasts to structure their data and enable it to be searched by search engines. Your website with structured content also benefits by topping the search results. As search engines are enabled to categorize your site, by deciphering the topical relevance of your data. This is only possible with the structured data with embedded Schema Mark-up in JSON-LD format.

Shema.org utilize shared vocabulary that can be used by webmasters to mark up their webpages. One can use the Schema.org vocabulary along with Microdata, RDFa or JSON-LD to add information to webpages content to be understood by major search engines.

Test the Structured data with schema mark-up for accuracy

JSON-LD format can be embedded in either head, body or footer of the page, without disturbing HTML mark-up of your web page and is also recommended by Google.

There are 1000s of types of schema to maximize the mark-up of your data from broad categories to more focused categories.

Google is constantly evolving and implementing new categories, properties and variables to bring major revolution in marking and structuring data for optimal utilization.

Apply tested schema to web pages

Pairing your data value with relevant category in structured data format, not only helps your site to look better, it also increases the chance to show up in the search results on priority and provides greater visibility.

Test Rich Snippets for accuracy

Defining your data with semantic language from structured data standpoint, will help search engines to know efficiently what your site is all about, instead of a guess work and categorize it properly.

One can test the webpage structure data results on Google’s Rich Results Test and also preview the rich results, to confirm the accuracy.

This also has the added advantage of becoming listed as rich snippet, featured snippet or be introduced in Google knowledge graph placement and increase your page visibility!

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WRITTEN BY

Shikha Saxena

A Technical Writer, an artist and blogger by choice. Passionate about reading , writing and editing. http://www.shikhasaxena.com and https://www.dnabox.co/

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As Published in Medium:

https://medium.com/swlh/how-embellishing-structured-data-with-json-ld-snippets-directs-and-helps-search-engines-3fb117f7d073

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