The document discusses the importance of semantic markup and structured data for enhancing the visibility of web pages in search results. It highlights the evolution of web markup, the introduction of schema.org, and the impact of rich snippets on click-through rates (CTR). Despite low current usage rates of schema.org, the presentation emphasizes the potential benefits in improving search prominence, even if it does not directly affect rankings.

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SEMANTIC SEARCH…
… WANTS STRUCTURED DATA!
Bastian Grimm, VP Organic Search, Peak Ace AG | @basgr

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Presentation Download:
http://pa.ag/smxm-schema

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The web is evolving…
… and so is it‘s mark-up!
HTML 2.0 HTML 4.0 XHTML 1.0 HTML 5
Sometime in between,
people started caring
about writing under-standable
code…

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#1 You Provide
Meaning
Semantic mark-up is meant to describe content!

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#2 You Increase
Maintainability
Do content in HTML; use CSS & JS for layout!

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#3 Semantic Mark-Up
is Quality
Browsers don’t really care, others systems do!

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It‘s all about machine-readable data!
According to Tim Berners-Lee (in 2001 already):
“The Semantic Web
provides a common
framework that
allows data to be
shared and reused
across application,
enterprise, and community
boundaries”
http://www.w3.org/2013/data/

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Because: „Regular“ HTML has limits!
Took Google long enough to figure that one out…!

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06/2011: Introducing schema.org
Announced by Google, Bing & Yahoo! Now: Yandex as well.

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04/2010: Global Roll-out of Rich Snippets
Loooong testing period BEVOR rolling out schema.org

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Why should I care about those?
What’s all the fuss, why not let Google handle it?

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CTR is influenced by more than position!
 Site-Links for a regular result
 Universal Results from Google News
 Video Snippet (image-only)
 Image Search Results
 Movie / TV Mark-Up
 Ratings
 Publication Date
 Breadcrumbs
 etc.

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SERP CTR studies are mostly over…
Rich Snippets, Personalization, Geo-Targeting & more!
http://moz.com/blog/google-organic-click-through-rates-in-2014

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SERP CTR…
…almost only depends on how GREAT your
snippet is & if you can make it stand out!

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Microdata on the rise?
Well… yes and no: Total amount of sites using is it still small!
http://trends.builtwith.com/docinfo/Microdata

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Compared to sites using HTML5:
Schema-growth / adoption rate is significantly smaller!
http://trends.builtwith.com/docinfo/HTML5-DocType

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Very few make use of schema.org!
Taken from Searchmetrics “HTML Microdata and RDF” Study
In the US, as few as 0.3% of
all domains are using
schema.org in their mark-up
But: Only 34% of all key-words
do not return any
schema.org (-like) snippet
Remember: Amazon.com &
Wikipedia don‘t use schema!
http://www.searchmetrics.com/en/knowledge-base/schema/

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Most Popular Markups: Movies & Offers
Taken from Searchmetrics “HTML Microdata and RDF” Study

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Looks like lot‘s of opportunities…!

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Does it help you with rankings?
In Short: It does not… but maybe a bit!?
“Google doesn’t use
markup for ranking
purposes at this time - but
rich snippets can make your web
pages appear more prominently
in search results, so you may
see an increase in
traffic.”
http://pa.ag/1tuhYZO

21. Introducing the Google Knowledge Graph
Surprise: We want “connect” and “understand” entities…!
21

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Back to my previous example:
Wikipedia + schema.org based Items to trigger KG-boxes

23. This is straight forward: “Cast” as a trigger
BTW: Did you know people don’t look at the carrousel?
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Mediative’s 2014 Study: http://pages.mediative.com/SERP-research

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Simple questions being answered…
Schema.org: Thing > Place > AdministrativeArea > Country

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Indirect triggers working to some extend:
City “Rome” connected to “Italy” w/ property “capital=true”…

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Google is moving forward…
Mainly to pick up on those “non-obvious” connections:
“It’s why we’ve been working on an
intelligent model that understands real-world
entities and their relationships to
one another: things, not strings.”

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This is where it get’s really interesting:
Google starting to answer “real world” questions…

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This is where it get’s really interesting:
And not only based on Wikipedia… other sources as well!

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Organic Search Results, anyone?

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Schema.org-based Vertical Search!
https://www.google.it/#q=paint.net&hl=en&tbm=app

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Implementing Schema.org is easy!
It’s just kind of “extended” HTML code to connect things
Rating  has value  9.4
Rating  has ratings  325
<form itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope
itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
<div class="score" style="background-color:#69cb02"
itemprop="ratingValue">9.4</div>
<span style="display:none;">out of
<span itemprop="bestRating">10</span>
<strong>User Rating</strong>
<div class="votes"><span itemprop="ratingCount">325</span>
votes</div>
</form>

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Schema.org has all the code!
Changes almost daily, monitor it? - changedetection.com

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Structured Data Testing Tool
Use HTML-Tab for developer testing (c/p from staging)
http://www.google.de/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

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Structured Data in Webmaster Tools
Gives you an idea which data Google sees on your domain

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Google Data Highlighter in GWT
Caution: This is only visible to Google, not to others!

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SCHEMA CREATION TOOLS
TO SPEED UP YOUR IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

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The microDATAgenerator
www.microdatagenerator.com

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Raven Schema Creator
www.schema-creator.org

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Schema Creator for WordPress
wordpress.org/plugins/schema-creator

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All In One Schema.org for WordPress
wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/

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If you’re on an CMS such as Drupal…
drupal.org/project/schemaorg

42. THERE IS A LOT OF CHANGES…
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TRY TO STAY ON TRACK!

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Introducing Schema.org Actions
…it’s no just about static entities, it’s about Actions on those!
Announcing Schema.org Actions: http://pa.ag/1wrLH8c

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Be innovative, play around…
But most importantly: Keep it real!
Report Rich Snippet Spam: http://pa.ag/1oad1Gu

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Your turn! Questions?
 bg@peakace.de
 twitter.com/peakaceag
 facebook.com/peakaceag
 www.peakace.de
http://pa.ag/smxm-schema