What Is Schema Markup?

Date First Published: 23rd February 2023

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: Web Technologies

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty: Medium

Difficulty Level: 6/10

CONTENTS

Types Of Schema Markup
Effect On SEO
Difference Between Schema.org, Structured Data, and Microdata
History

Learn more about what schema markup is in this article.

Schema markup (Schema.org) is a form of structured data that helps major search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yandex to understand what pages are about and display a rich snippet (enhanced description) on the search results. This improves the way that pages display in the SERPs and makes them stand out. For example, someone might add structured data to a recipe so that search engines can display the cooking time, ingredients, user ratings, and more in the search results page.

Schema can be added to webpages using microdata or RDFa. Microdata is a set of tags that aims to make annotating HTML elements easier with machine-readable tags. RDFa is an extension to HTML5 and it was designed to help users to mark up structured data.

Note:

Website owners can generate their own code by using Google's Structured Data Markup Helper, as shown below.

Types Of Schema Markup

Google understands 32 types of schema markup, including:

Article
Book
Breadcrumb
Carousel
Course
Dataset
Employer Aggregate Rating
Event
Fact check
FAQ
Home Activities
How-to
Image license
Job posting
Learning video
Maths Solvers
Movie
Education Q&A
Estimated salary
Podcast
Practice problems
Q&A
Recipe
Software app (Beta)
Subscription and paywalled content
Video

Common types of schema markup include:

Review markup. This adds a star rating to the bottom part of the search result. It is useful for showing searchers what other people think about a product or service.
Local business markup. This contains contact information, the business address, opening hours, and other important information.
Logo markup. This tells Google the logo of a business so that the right logo will appear in Google Knowledge Panel each time someone searches for the business.
Sitelink markup. This adds additional navigational links to a listing on the search results page. When searching for a site, searchers will also see links to other important pages instead of just the homepage.
Product markup. This provides Google with more information about products on a site so that searchers can see more details on the search results page. The information can include the price and the star rating.

Below is an example of sitelink markup for this website in the SERPs.

Effect On SEO

Whether a page uses schema markup is not a direct ranking factor. However, schema markup makes it possible to get rich snippets, which will make results stand out. This improved visibility will increase organic click-through rates, increasing the amount of organic traffic a site gets. Schema helps Google and searchers to understand what a page is about, but John Mueller of Google said that "There's no generic ranking boost for SD usage. That's the same as far as I remember. However, SD can make it easier to understand what the page is about, which can make it easier to show where it's relevant (improves targeting, maybe ranking for the right terms). (not new, IMO)"

Difference Between Schema.org, Structured Data, and Microdata

Schema.org is a project that offers a set of definitions for microdata tags that have been agreed upon. Structured data is a way of pairing a name with a value that helps search engines categorise and index pages and microdata is a form of structured data that works with HTML5.

History

Schema.org was first launched on 2nd June 2011 by Bing, Google and Yahoo with the goal of supporting a common set of schemas for structured data markup on webpages that could be used consistently throughout the World Wide Web.

In November 2011, Yandex joined the initiative. They propose using the schema.org markup and the Microdata, RDFa, or JSON-LD formats to mark up website content with metadata about itself.