What Is Schema and Why Do I Want It for My Website?

Working to improve the SEO of your business website? You’ve probably run across references to “schema” and wondered what it is and if you really need it. Read on for a brief overview.

To get your business found online today, you must optimize your website for search engines. It’s never been more important, which is why we talk about Search Engine Optimization so much. We’ve discussed optimizing your content and choosing the right search terms. We’ve also reviewed the technical aspects of optimization such as meta tags and page speed. Schema takes SEO a step further.

What is schema?

Schema is a markup language used on websites. HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the agreed-upon language that creates content on the internet. Schema is an additional agreed-upon language to help search engines better understand that content. Your website is built with HTML, but schema may not have been added.

Schema is also known as “structured data,” and it’s the structure that lets search engines easily locate information about a website so it can index it appropriately. Simple data fields include information such as the address and phone number of a business, but there are many more ways for search engines to identify and sort websites.

For instance, say there’s a pizza webpage. Search engines will want to know how to index that page. Is it a recipe for how to make pizza? Is it a job offer at a pizza place? Or is it a product page for ordering pizza? With the correct schema, the page is indexed quickly and accurately so it can be served up just as quickly and accurately in a search query.

How is schema added to a website?

Some web platforms have some limited schema options already built in along with HTML, but most need schema added, which means inserting specific code to the back-end of a website, usually JSON-LD. The code identifies data in an unambiguous way that search engines recognize and index immediately.

There’s a website developers use when writing schema code. As of this publishing date, the site lists a data vocabulary hierarchy of 816 Types, 1516 Properties, 14 Datatypes, 94 Enumerations, and 521 Enumeration members.Whew!

Adding the code is definitely an important step, but providing the correct data is also vital. The business owner needs to work closely with their web developer and their marketing expert to provide the right data in the right structure.

Why is schema important to SEO?

Without schema, search engines have to guess at a web page’s content based on content clues. Optimized title tags and descriptions help a lot, but we’ve all had the experience where too many of the results to our search query were not what we expected. With schema, users get more accurate results for their queries, which is the ultimate goal of search engines.

The goal of a business or organization is to be that accurate result, of course. Schema, along with content and technical optimization, equips a website in the best ways to be appropriately indexed and advantageously displayed in search results.  

If coding is not your specialty, you’ll want a technical partner to work on your website’s schema. Sprocket Websites has been the technical partner for many different kinds of websites, and we’d be happy to do the same for you. Contact us today to learn how we can work together!

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk

Kate GingoldKate Gingold

I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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I have been writing a blog with web marketing tips and techniques every other week since 2003. In addition to blogging and client content writing, I write books and a blog on local history.

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