Schemas >> Schema.org >> Take Your Website to a New Level with Schema Markup
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This presentation walks you through my findings on how to use schema markup to take your website “to the next level”. I have been working with schema in a number of fields and have seen consistent improvements in all of them. In this presentation I’ll share insights on how you can implement a schema the right way … There is a fundamental difference between data and information: Data are for example temperatures we collect via satellite imaging of the earth … If we look at this from a search marketing perspective, we’ll see that our websites all have at they very heart a database where each record is linked to others: queries can exract answers to complex questions and by doing so obtain INFORMATION. But once the query has been triggered and the page created it becomes just another page the search engines index – the challenge for the search engines is to understand what each page is all about… Data must be processed and interpreted: by doing so we transform it into information and derive trends: it becomes actionable! Organizations process information to reduce Uncertainty and Equivocality: The keyword is disambiguation. There are certain requirements we implicitly take for granted about the information we produce and consume in our everyday life… information is required to be available for us to consume, we also need that information to be consistent across the various platforms: of course this is true when we refer to information about places or products, events or findings, we would like this to be applicable also to news… These requirements can be further defined when information provides attributes such as properties, characteristics, features and/or location… When all these aspects have been defined the set of data with attributes then becomes an ENTITY. And Entities can be linked amongst each other to express concepts and answer questions: It is the world of linked data. Now let's look at Schema and how to use schema.org The Schema.org website offers an explanation on WHY we should use schema – here are a few key elements which help understand why schema is so important… I’d like to draw your attention to this aspect – what they are saying here is that search technology cannot compete with our capability to understand and interpret content. That’s why we need to add this additional layer of code to our pages and give the search engines more “clues” and signals about our pages and our website (=what our website is about, main focus, etc.) And this is done with itemscope and itemtype – let’s see what they are and how we can use them … With itemscope we specify (and thereby alert the search engines) that this segment of the page is related to a certain topic – but that’s not enough: we need to specify WHAT that topic is and provide AS MANY DETAILS AS POSSIBLE ABOUT IT – more on this in the next slides. For more info or a consultation, contact
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Schemas >> Schema.org >> Take Your Website to a New Level with Schema Markup
- 1. Structured DataTake Your Website to a New Level with Schema Markup From a web of Documents & Data To a web of Information & Entities
- 2. Data Values of qualitative or quantitative variables in raw or unorganized form such as alphabets, numbers, or symbols that refer to, or represent, conditions, ideas, or objects
- 4. Data Information Why do Organizations Process Information? “Reduce Uncertainty” and “Reduce Equivocality”
- 6. Data Information Attributes Properties (person, animal, or thing) Characteristics (dimensions, weight, name, … ) Features (aspect, peculiarities, … ) Location(Continent, Country, City … )
- 10. Why Use Microdata? Your web pages have an underlying meaning that people understand when they read the web pages. But search engines have a limited understanding of what is being discussed on those pages.
- 12. Why Use Microdata? By adding additional tags to the HTML of your web pages … you can help search engines and other applications better understand your content and display it in a useful, relevant way.
- 13. Itemscope & Itemtype <div> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div> “To begin, identify the section of the page that is "about" the movie Avatar. To do this, add the itemscope element to the HTML tag that encloses information about the item, like this:”
- 14. Itemscope & Itemtype <div itemscope> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div> By adding itemscope, you are specifying that the HTML contained in the <div>...</div> block is about a particular item. But it's not all that helpful to specify that there is an item being discussed without specifying what kind of an item it is. You can specify the type of item using the itemtype attribute immediately after the itemscope.
- 15. Itemscope & Itemtype <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a> </div>
- 16. Itemprop What additional information can we give search engines about the movie Avatar? Movies have interesting properties such as actors, director, ratings. To label properties of an item, use the itemprop attribute. For example, to identify the director of a movie, add itemprop="director" to the element enclosing the director's name.
- 17. Itemprop <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop=“name”>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop=“director”> James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html” itemprop=“trailer”>Trailer</a> </div> This specifies that the item contained in the div is in fact a Movie, as defined in the schema.org type hierarchy. Item types are provided as URLs, in this case http://schema.org/Movie
- 20. Nesting Properties <div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop=“name”>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span itemprop=“director”> James Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html” itemprop=“trailer”>Trailer</a> </div> <div itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/Movie> <h1 itemprop="name">Avatar</h1> <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype=http://schema.org/Person> <span>Director: <span itemprop="givenName"> James</span> <span itemprop="familyName">Cameron</span> (born August 16, 1954)</span> <meta itemprop="birthDate" content ="1954-08-16" /> </div> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a> </div> Before… After…
- 24. Meta Tags with Content “Sometimes, a web page has information that would be valuable to mark up, but the information can't be marked up because of the way it appears on the page.” http://schema.org/docs/gs.html#advanced This technique should be used sparingly. Only use meta with content for information that cannot otherwise be marked up.
- 25. How to Proceed Useful Tips
- 26. Develop a Model Identify the Element which best fits with your market segment (Travel, E-commerce, Legal, Manufacturing, Adult Entertainment…)
- 30. Test Test and Test again! It will take a number of iterations before you get this right and fit it into your corporate CMS The more you markup, the better it is!
- 32. Sante J. Achille • Search Marketing Specialist • Has analysed and optimized countless websites of all sizes and types in 20 years of professional activity • Loves proverbs • His motto: Why Be Normal? • He thinks: “people should speak less and think more! https://www.google.com/search?q=sante+j.+achille https://www.evernote.com/pub/sjachille/cv @sjachille
Editor's Notes
- Good morning everybody today I’d like to walk you through some of my experiments and findings on how to use schema markup to take your website “to the next level”. I have been working with schema in a number of fields and have seen consistent improvements in all of them. In this presentation I’ll share insights on how you can implement a schema the right way …
- There is a fundamental difference between data and information: Data are for example temperatures we collect via satellite imaging of the earth … If we look at this from a search marketing perspective, we’ll see that our websites all have at they very heart a database where each record is linked to others: queries can exrtact answers to complex questions and by doing so obtain INFORMATION. But once the query has been triggered and the page created it becomes just another page the search engines index – the challenge for the search engines is to understand what each page is all about…
- Data must be processed and interpreted: by doing so we transform it into information and derive trends: it becomes actionable!
- There are certain requirements we implicitly take for granted about the information we produce and consume in our everyday life… information is required to be available for us to consume, we also need that information to be consistent across the various platforms: of course this is true when we refer to information about places or products, events or findings, we would like this to be applicable also to news…
- Those high level requirements can be further defined when information provides attributes such as properties, characteristics, features and/or location…
- When all these aspects have been defined the set of data with attributes then becomes an Entity –
- And Entities can be linked amongst each other to express concepts and answer questions: It is the world of linked data
- In the rest of my presentation I will transform these abstract concepts into actionable activities you can use starting tomorrow morning, transforming your website. You see our problem. We create these wonderful dynamic websites which rely on the information we store in powerful databases. The database provides structure because of the intrinsic relational nature, but once extracted information, in the eyes of the search engines is once again data. With schema we can create a layer of code which is used by the search engines to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity (Equivocality) . Our journey to achieve these objectives begins at the schema.org website. There are a number of other options available (let’s mention RFDa which is the main alternative) but at this point in time there is a trend in favour of schema.org. Schema.org is dry to say the least: sometimes I think is has been written by a survivor of the Soviet Union… There isn’t much information to go by and make it simple for you to create a schema. When you point your browser to this page you’ll be impressed: there are hundreds of properties to use in a growing number of areas (new schemas are being implemented constantly).
- The Schema.org website offers an explanation on WHY we should use schema – here are a few key elements which help understand why schema is so important… I
- I’d like to draw your attention to this aspect – what they are saying here is that search technology cannot compete with our capability to understand and interpret content.
- That’s why we need to add this additional layer of code to our pages and give the search engines more “clues” and signals about our pages and our website (=what our website is about, main focus, etc.)
- And this is done with itemscope and itemtype – let’s see what they are and how we can use them …
- With itemscope we specify (and thereby alert the search engines) that this segment of the page is related to a certain topic – but that’s not enough: we need to specify WHAT that topic is and provide AS MANY DETAILS AS POSSIBLE ABOUT IT – more on this in the next slides.
- So here is our first piece of Schema. We have told the search engines (bots) that this segment of content on the page is related to a movie. But we’re only at the very beginning of the process. We can tell the search engines a lot more then that! So let’s take this to the next level and implement more markup to specificy a number of other signals which will make it much easier to understand what we are talking about.
- To help us in our efforts and provide the search engines with a set of structured data schema.org makes available to us the ITEMPROP element. We use this to specify properties to html elements within the page.
- This is how the ITEMPROP element is used as an integral part of the schema. ITEMPROP helps identify attributes in a definite manner and by doing so reduces uncertainty related to the number of possible meanings that a word or phrase cold have.
- So let’s take a closer look at the schema related Movies we started analysing so far… within the Object (or can we say “record”) there are a number of properties we can use to markup our content. Properties are described by “Expected Types” which offer the opportunity to tell the search engines everything we know about the property. Let’s see how properties and expected elements can be used in combination. Here we have the ELEMENT MOVIE and there are many properties related to a movie, one of them is Director, which is a person. We can use the Expected Type Person to provide as much information possible about the Person – Director.
- The property Person has many Expected Tyoes to be used in the definition of the person – let’s consider a few and use birthDate, familyName, and givenName.
- One of the most common shortcomings I have seen is in the NESTING or properties and Expected Types which is a very strong signal to the search engines: nesting properties introduces functional ties between elements and provides that structure which goes missing when data is extracted from the database. Nesting plays an essential role in providing structure to data.
- You can and need to test your code. My experience over the years has taught me to start small and build it up step by step – this tool will help you understand where you make mistakes and offer suggestions to remove the errors.
- It was much nicer before – the “old” rich snippet validation interface offered a more intuitive view, easier to read in complex models and I’ll show what just what I mean in a moment.
- Let’s go back to the slide we saw a few minutes ago and focus on a META TAG I used to include data for the Property birthDate. This information was not present on page and was not relevant in this specific instance, yet IT IS AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION to reduce uncertainty and ambiguity so it was included in a META TAG WHICH IS NOT VISIBLE to the user but is read by the search engines.
- This event is foreseen for schemas and this is what they say about using META TAGS to markup information when we are in these special conditions – the point being that in everyday life 9 out of 10 we are faced with this kind of situation – and I’ll show you some examples