The majority
of web traffic is driven by the major search engines – Google, Bing and Yahoo. Search
techniques used by these search engines are becoming more and more complex as
humanity, technology, lifestyle and everything about our world becomes more
complex. There are now more categories
than ever before for search engines to compile and categorize. Implementing
effective Search Engine Optimization SEO within your site can increase the
number of visitors to your website.
Search engines are smart, but they still need
help. Google, Yahoo and
Bing are using Schema, special code
that makes it easier for search engines to identify what a site, or even a
paragraph, is all about. It is applied
to the content of a web page to define exactly what it is and how it should be
treated. Schema elements and attributes are
added directly to the HTML code (the
markup language used to create your web pages) of a page to provide the search
engine crawlers with additional information.
Schema markup is extremely important to SEO because it helps search engines better identify the type
of information on the pages of your website, and in turn, increase your
visibility.
Including Schema structured data in your web pages provides richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. One of the benefits to using Schema markup is that it can lead to enhanced search engine result listings called “rich snippets,” like the one below from the Internet Movie Database that shows user ratings for the Hobbit movie:
Here is part
of the html code with the schema code highlighted that creates the star rating
for this Hobbit post:
<div itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"
itemscope itemprop="aggregateRating">
Ratings:<span
itemprop="ratingValue">8.0</span>
<span itemprop="bestRating">10</span>
</div>
</div>
The itemprop="ratingValue"
assigns the rating and the itemprop="bestRating" assigns the
highest value. So 8 out of 10 translates
to a 4 of 5 star rating and google applies this math and comes up with a
graphic to display next to the listing.
Investing in SEO can have an exceptional rate of return compared to other
types of marketing and promotion. A
study by ComScore found that 93% of all internet traffic comes from a search
engine. Another study by Optify, Inc.
showed that the top ranking website has an average click-through rate of 37%
while 60% of the clicks go to the top three results. People search for anything and everything on
search engines and ensuring your website is capable of ranking high in the
engines is crucial to your company’s marketing efforts.
searchenginewatch.com
schema.org
wordstream.com
ComScore.com
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