Schema Markup and Dental SEO
Rewarding Your Website for Making Search Engines Smarter

What is Schema?

Schema markup (also referred to as structured data or microdata) is one of the newest forms of optimization for websites. It’s arguably the most powerful, while also being one of the least applied SEO practices at your disposal today. When utilized correctly it can have a significantly positive impact on your websites ranking. It’s essentially a code that, once implemented into your website, makes search engines smarter by breaking down all the components of a web page and explaining what each part of the page is.

Schema.org was actually created as a collaborative effort by Bing, Google, and Yahoo. It’s not too often that competitors work together which should be a strong indicator that search engines want you to use it. The result of their efforts was an agreed upon set of code markers that tells search engines what to do with all the data on your website. When a website is correctly marked up with schema, search engine users can see in their results exactly what a website is all about, where the business is located, how much products cost, and much more before deciding which result they’d like to pursue. It’s kind of like having a virtual business card. When search engines can display more information to help users make an informed decision they believe that this will improve their users experience. If your website is focused on a great user experience you’re more likely to be rewarded with higher rankings.

Hidden messages for Google

Let’s be clear, schema exists exclusively for search engines. We hide it inside the HTML code that makes up your website. Visitors will never see it (unless they are inspecting the page’s source code). It looks just like HTML code, but it isn’t! The whole point of it is to describe the content on each page. Over the years Google has gotten very good at identifying parts of content and deciding what’s important, but it’s not perfect. By using microdata integration, we can help search engines segregate the most important parts of the content.

How effective is schema markup?

Put plainly, websites that use schema markup will rank better than websites that don’t. One study found that on average websites with schema markup ranked 4 positions higher in search results than those that don’t. While it’s not completely clear that this is due to markup alone, there is obviously enough correlation to justify its implementation.

Currently, about 1/3rd of Google’s search results have rich snippets, which includes schema markup. But, according to Searchmetrics, only .3% of all websites actually use schema markup!

Basically, there are millions of websites that are either ignoring or are just plain unaware of this huge opportunity to improve their SEO potential. We here at WEO Media are capitalizing on this opportunity for our SEO clients. By implementing schema markup into your website we can give you an automatic leg up on the vast majority of your competition.