What is Structured Data Marking?

Like all aspects of the internet, the searches we carry out on the web evolve over time at a dizzying pace. Every time we make requests with increasingly complex structures and from different devices or formats, and with this, the way in which they are treated by content search engines evolves. For all this today, having a page with structured data can be a big difference at the level of positioning. The objective of Google (and other search engines) is to be able to show you the most appropriate result to your search, being as specific as possible, so it is vital to know how to interpret the meaning of the query, its intentionality and its context; known as semantic search.

Structured data marking: Structured data marking means indicating on a page what are the different elements that appear on it. For example, if the page in question is an article, we could mark who the author is, the date of publication and addition, the language, the different sections that compose it, etc ... in the case that it was a recipe cooking, we would do the same with data such as ingredients, nutritional information or even the necessary steps to carry it out.

How do we mark this data?: With structured data, which are a series of "tags" that are incorporated into the code of our website. Therefore, the marking of structured data consists of labeling the relevant data of a web page to help search engines (mainly) to understand and process its content and structure reliably.

Advantages of marking your content with structured data: SEO positioning aid: The main advantage of correctly marking the content is obvious. The more we facilitate the “understanding” of the data provided by our page, the better this information can be classified and show results according to what users are looking for. In the case of Google and search results, structured data is related to rich snippets and rich cards

·   Improve the CTR: Rich snippets increase the information shown in these results. Google can display this extra information in the results of various types of items, such as products, articles, recipes, events, etc. This extra information makes our results capture more user attention, generating more clicks and therefore improving data like the CTR

·   Mobile first: For its part, rich cards are an evolution of rich snippets where information is displayed in a much more visual way. Oriented mainly to mobile users, they are shown in the form of a carousel and can include several cards from the same website. Currently, these rich cards are only shown for certain types of items but Google will expand the range in the future. In the following image you can see the differences between the presentation formats of the search elements

·    Power email Marketing: Structured data can also be used to display our emails in the Gmail inbox in new and useful ways. Currently, they are used to display more visual information in the emails of event reservations, flights, hotels etc. In addition to the advantage that our search results and emails are displayed more visually and with more information (not only in Google, but in search engines such as Bing or Yahoo), structured data is also important in Google Merchant Center

·    Help to have our Merchant Center always updated: Merchant Center, the Google tool where we can upload product data from our store for Shopping Ads, uses a feed system to keep our product information updated. However, the automatic update frequency of these feeds is limited to a maximum of 24 hours. If our stock of products or prices of them changes frequently (something very common), discrepancies between actual data and uploads to merchant center occur. This is where structured data comes in, as Google uses it in its automatic product updates to keep the data always up to date

    How to mark the Data?: We have seen that the marking of structured data consists of labeling the content of our pages. To perform this labeling, it is best to use the vocabulary Schema.org which is the closest thing to a data markup standard, founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. This allows us to use a standard vocabulary for labeling that most search engines support and understand.

    The way in which we insert this labeling is in the code of our website. However, although we have several formats to implement these tags, these are the most common:

·     JSON-LD: Format recommended by Google for marking, consists of annotations in the Javascript programming language that is not interspersed with the information visible by the user, making it easier to maintain and update.

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      Microdata / RDFa: This type of format uses HTML tag attributes to mark. While RDFa is necessary to implement it in user-visible content, micro-data may be present in the page header.

   To label our information, we have a multitude of tools that will help us in the process. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to use a plugin for your platform. If your page is built with one of the most popular content managers (CMS) (Wordpress, Prestashop, Magento, Drupal, Shopify, etc ...) already have full plugins available and checked by the community that will automatically tag all the elements of your site.

    

    If the system in which your website is developed does not have a plugin, or you prefer to perform this process manually, there are several tools that we can use to make this process easier. The most useful is the Google Structured Data Markup Wizard in which, through simple steps, you can select the data to be labeled visually and interactively in a preview of the page. Depending on the type of element, it will guide us on the different properties that allow marking and which are mandatory.

Author Bio: Cameron Mclean is a professional academic writer. He also has tried her hand at writing short creative stories for children. At present, he is affiliated with do my assignment institute and working as a content writer