What is structured data, and why use it for SEO

[tarekma7]

What is structured data, and why use it for SEO

We do it every day, even several times a day: we open a browser window and ask Google to answer a question, find information, or simply satisfy our curiosity.

Whether it's about work or our personal lives, we always expect a quick, accurate answer, and to its credit, Google does its best to satisfy us.

But how does it do it? How does it understand what it is we're really looking for?

It's not a trivial question: understanding how the most widely used search engine in the world works actually means learning how to build our websites in a way that allows them to be indexed better, and therefore to position ourselves better, perhaps even on the first page of search results!

In this guide, we'll discuss how Google tries to understand natural language, and how we can help it along by using structured data. We'll gain a better understanding of what it is, how to use it, and most importantly, what advantages it can bring us.

From key words to the search intent
Metadata: data that describes data
What is structured data?
What is Schema.org?
How to insert structured data
How Google uses structured data
Snippets and Rich Snippets
Benefits of structured data
Structured data and voice searches
Conclusions

From key words to the search intent
Let's start with an example: let's say you wanted to do a search, and you typed in “Mercury”.

If you think the search engine simply searches for pages that match the key words, I'm sorry to say that things have changed. Google tries to “understand” what we write, ever since the 2013 and 2015 updates to its algorithms introduced natural language analysis and artificial intelligence: now, semantics have become a key factor in Google searches.

Let's look at our example again. Google isn't simply searching for files that contain the word “Mercury". Instead, it tries to understand our search intent: are we interested in the planet or in the element?

As humans, we can resolve these kinds of ambiguities more or less automatically. It's a little more complicated for search engines, however. Google strives to overcome linguistic ambiguities and understand our requests, as well as the contents presented on web pages, using context clues.

But how does a search engine know what the context is? By reading metadata.


Metadata: data that describes data

Simply defined, metadata is data that describes other data.

This is not a new concept: for example, librarians use metadata to categorize books in order to be able to find them faster.

“Title,” “Author”, “Year", and “Publishing House” are the metadata that serve to categorize the data.

Metadata needs to follow a classification system that everyone understands in order to work. In other words, there needs to be a set of rules, a standard that everyone follows in order for the system to be successful.

When it comes to search engines, metadata is called structured data, and they are implemented according to a set of rules called Schema.org.

What is structured data?

Structured data is meta information that has to be inserted into the pages’ HTML code in order to provide additional data which is used by search engines to categorize and better understand their contents.

This data is said to be “structured” because, as mentioned, it is organized according to the Schema.org vocabulary, a chart which allows entities and relationships to be defined by transforming content into data.

In practice, correctly inserting this metadata and following Schema.org's syntax rules allows Google to understand the meaning of the information available, and deliver more relevant search results to users.

As Google explains in its own developer guide: You can help us by providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page to Google by including structured data on the page [...] Google uses structured data that it finds on the web to understand the content of the page [...]”.

What is Schema.org?

Let's take a moment to look more closely at Schema.org. As mentioned above, it's a vocabulary of structured data (markups) which defines entities, actions, and relationships on the Internet.

In practice, the Schema.org vocabulary includes formats for structuring data relating to all kinds of people, places, and things on the web: the complete list of elements that the Schema markups can define is available on the Schema.org website.

For example, Schema.org has a lexicon for travel, which can define departure dates, arrival dates, and a description of the offers.

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