Why Structured Data and Linked Data is Critical for Search Engine Results
The vast majority of websites lack this key SEO feature. It’s time to change that.
People usually turn to search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo to provide instant information about anything and everything. Throughout the years, these search engine algorithms have evolved in order to improve relevancy, usability, reliability, and quality for billions of searches each day. In order to be competitive with search engine rankings, many businesses, marketers, and organizations must constantly deploy new tools and tactics to stay ahead of the game.
Search engine companies also compete with each other for market share of overall searches on the web. Google has led the competition for nearly two decades, and since inception has grown to build their own operating system, web browser, and smart devices in an effort to capture and retain more search volume.
Google has a search engine market share of 88.61% as of July 2019.
Source: J. Clement at Statista, Business Data Platform
Making Sense of The Web
One of the challenges facing search engine companies is the ability to make sense of the data and content displayed by the over 1.5 billion web sites around the world in order to deliver the most relevant results to their users. Unfortunately, the vast majority of web site data is completely unstructured and unlinked from other web and data sources. This leaves search engines to make a best guess about what these websites are about, which may make it difficult to serve relevant information to their users. Fortunately, there is a helpful solution to make it easier for search engines to better understand web site data in terms of both content and context.
Semantic Web
In 2011, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex united to form schema.org, a collaborative community whose goal is to build and promote structured data on the internet. Search engine companies strive to deliver high quality results, therefor they need webmasters to build machine-readable, search engine-friendly websites.
Since its inception, semantic web has been implemented by millions of web sites. However, the vast majority of websites still do not include structured data or poorly utilize it. Some estimates are that as much as 70% of all websites lack the use of structured data, leaving search engines with the burden of figuring out the meaning of these websites all on their own.
Contrary to what many people believe, search engines actually learn very little from HTML metadata such as meta tags, meta keywords, and meta descriptions. Metadata is mostly used for content sharing across social media platforms. In reality, structured data and page content is what search engines actually utilize to deliver high quality search results.
Here’s what Google has to say:
“Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page, as well as to gather information about the web and the world in general.”
Search Engines Algorithms
Most search engine companies deploy a variety of proprietary tools and technologies in order to solve the problems with understanding website data. The exact details of these processes, methods, and techniques are mostly secret, however, we know that search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and others employ the use of machine learning, neural networks, and natural language processing in order to build up their understanding of the web.
Adding Structured Data for Rich Search Results
Although search engines make great use of machine learning their search algorithms, it is a good idea to inform search engines exactly what your website data and content is about in exactly the format that these search engines are looking for.
If your goal is to improve your search engine rankings and deliver the best possible user experience to your users, it is best practice to utilize structured data and linked data on each of your web pages so that search engines can better understand the content and context of your website.
Here is a list of examples of structured data that search engines scan for:
- Local Business Listing
- Organization Information
- Information about a Person or Public Figure
- Product Information
- Service Listings
- Question and Answers
- How-To’s
The Markup
So now you might ask, “how do I add structured data to my web page?” Well, structured data utilizes machine-readable formats such as JSON-LD, RDFa, and Microdata. It depends on your specific use-case, but we recommend that you use JSON-LD, which looks something like this:
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org/",
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "ASPCA",
"url": "https://www.aspca.org/",
"sponsor":
{
"@type": "Organization",
"name": "exampleCorp",
"url": "http://www.example.com/"
}
}
</script>As you can see, JSON-LD allows you to enter information about your organization, local business, products, or services that are machine-readable (and also somewhat human readable), ready for search engines to link to search queries.
Visit https://jsonld.com/ for more production-ready code snippets for webmasters and web builders.
Website API for Search Engines
Interestingly, since JSON-LD at its core is simply JSON code, you can think about structured data with JSON-LD as a “Website API for Search Engines”. This allows search engine crawlers the ability to directly query your website for relevant information so that their algorithms can properly identify and classify your website for more accurate search results.
As an aside, I predict that in the future, search engines will better rank websites, businesses, and brands that provide a public API to allow third-parties to tap into data sources such as user data, sales data, product and service data, and more. But I’ll leave that for another future article.
The Results
Using Google’s Structured Data tool, search engines are better able to learn and understand data about websites then be able to deliver rich results. Information about nearby locations, company news, new products, additional services, frequently asked questions, related organizations, custom search bar, and much more.
Microsoft, as a world leader in technology and co-founder of schema.org, serve their web pages with structured, linked data which helps search engines understand their organization in-depth.
Compare Microsoft’s search results to the results about Databit Software, a generic tech company name. There is little to no structured data available which limits the data that search engines are able to learn, understand, then display to end users. Since this structured data is scarce or non-existent, this search produces bare, minimal, uninspiring results. No office location, contact information, services, or product listings.
Our Structured Data Features
Due to how important structured data is for search engines and the semantic web, we include structured data and linked data in all of our website packages. This means each web page has information such as office locations, business hours, product and service listings, user reviews, and more ready for search engines to transform into rich search results. This way search engines don’t have to guess what our client websites are about, instead we allow search engines to tap directly into our structured data schema.
Learn More about our website services: https://webdataiot.com
Conclusion
Structured data and linked data is highly recommended for those who are interested in boosting their organic search results. In an age where there is a plethora of SEO and marketing tools and services, structured data is still largely missing from the vast majority of web sites. Although this article is a brief introduction into the rabbit hole that is structure data, hopefully this will help more companies, organizations, people, and brands turn this missed opportunity into rich search engine results.
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