How Schema Is Playing Games With Today’s SERP’s?

Having a very important part in the web semantics revolution, the schema is changing the whole web by improving the quality of our search results and reforming the way in which we find information online. The semantic web in itself is a change of approach towards explaining the content by the use of code tags in such a way that search engines could understand.

By tagging on-page content with the content identifiers, and the ultimate contextual link is provided by Semantic Web between the publisher intent and content. This link helps the search engines in providing more accurate, specific and enriched content to the user in the search results.

In this post, we will see how today’s SERP’s are transforming as a result of the Semantic Web.

In this post, we’ll look at ways the Semantic Web is transforming today’s SERPs.
More specifically, we will explore how schema could be used to get the attention of the viewers through rich snippets.

How to Use These Tags?
For instance, we want our business name and address to appear on our About Us page. Typically, such code may look something like this:

Blurbpoint Media
T-6/7/9, Shubh Complex,
Shahibaug, Ahmedabad.
Gujarat, India.

Using schema for semantic tagging may look like this:

<div itemprop=”address” itemscope=”” itemtype=”http://schema.or/PostalAddress”>
<span itemprop=”name”>Blurbpoint Media</span><br />
<span itemprop=”streetAddress”>T-6/7/9, Shubh Complex</span><br />
<span itemprop=”addressLocality”>Shahibaug, Ahmedabad</span>,<br />
<span itemprop=”addressRegion”>Gujarat</span><br />
<span itemprop=”postalCode”>380004</span></div>

Notice the words given in quotes. By adding the schema code, we have defined that this piece of content addresses and have defined each and every part of the information to create a proper association of the name of the business, address, city, state, country and postal code.

What Difference Do Rich Snippets Make?

The most wonderful, visible advantage of incorporating schema tags, are those rich snippets that grab the eye-balls, showed up by major search engines. These snippets completely transform the plain text-based search engine results into attractive, eye-catching results that very successfully describes the page’s content with the help of displaying images and review stars, along with very stylized text and links.

How much impact do these visual snippets create? Let’s have a look:

We have given 2 examples here of a same movie title called “Agneepath”. The movies’ information is given by the same site. The rich snippets over here show the number of votes, ratings in number and also star. A short description is also given for both the movies by the site which helps us in differentiating between both.

The new standard which is collaboration between major search engines expands the vocabulary of the semantic web. Schema.org supports a number of tags. To have a look at the same click on the below given link and you will get a list of all the schemas available:
http://www.schema.org/docs/full.html

While analyzing the schema tags to be implemented, it is important to see their effect on adding quality to the search results. The search engine adopts only certain schema data in its search results. You could also look into those schemas which are compatible with various search engines.

Your CTR would dramatically boost up on organic search results with the help of rich snippets.

Having said that, there is one more crucial factor on the search engines’ result page that might have been overlooked by many– attribute search filtering.

Staying Ahead in the Race with Attribute Search Filtering

How useful schema information could be is displayed in the left side bar of many a Google SERP’s. Let us take an example of dedicated search modes offered by Google for recipe schema records. This feature allows the users to filter the search results by using the attribute values given in “Search Tools”. This is a very crucial SEO tactic, as if you fail to tag your content with schema, would only mean that you are losing on those filtered results.

To check this out, I have taken the example of the “recipes for Banana Pudding”

When I enter this keyword and hit enter, I am presented with all the recipes for Banana Pudding as shown below:

However, Google provides me with a very convenient feature of filtering the searches as per my likes. So, I click on “Search Tools” and select my preference and that is less than 100 calories. The same is shown below:

It would be noticed that Google now displays only the recipes which are below 100 calories. This is possible with the attribute search filters which enhance the whole search experience and your visibility.

With the help of this feature, users will be able to filter the basic search results quickly by selecting the specific attributes as per their preference. This is what the power of the Semantic Web is all about. The main motive has always been to help the search engines understand your content in a much better way so that they could display your websites for relevant searches. What better way to directly communicate with the search engines and tell them what your content is all about.

Are There Schema Creators Available?

At first, it is quite difficult for developers and SEO’s alike, to implement and use the coding of the schema data. Thus, help is available in the form of some schema creators who have various items in their list. You simply need to provide the required information and the code will be prepared which could be inserted into your HTML page. One of the best schema creators is provided by Raven which has some items list already there on the website.

For the developers:

If you are adding schema to your site, you could try working with the Google Rich Snippets Testing Tool to ensure that you are getting the desired results by changing the code.

Conclusion

Structured data isn’t an easy deal for humans to implement on a website, but it’s easy for machines to comprehend. It is inevitable for all SEO’s developers, bloggers, and internet marketers to add schema mark-up to the content to gain the desired visibility from search results.

Lastly, schema.org does not directly impact your ranking on the search engines. It means that search engines are not going to rank you high for just implementing schema, but it will surely help you in getting high visibility for your content and bring in relevant searchers on the basis of your content.