Implementing structured data markup enables rich results on search engine results pages, potentially increasing clicks to your pages. Two other benefits comes with it: costs nothing because it’s for organic search results; may increase organic rankings.
The first step to start diving in this structured data world is to focus on which kind of information you want to show when a user search for one of your products. You can use structured data in many ways, for example to show your local business information (email, address, opening hours, telephone), product names, prices, limited time offers (holiday deals), reviews and ratings.
There are three types of Structured Data Markup:
- Microdata
- Microformats
- RFDa
Each one has different characteristics but Microdata has all the type of information that we need to use on eCommerce sites. Google and Bing can both understand product-related microdata featuring Schema.org’s product, offer, and review vocabulary.
The markup of Schema microdata consists of 3 elements: itemscope, itemtype and itemprops. The itemscope attribute encloses information about the item. The itemtype is used to specify the type of item and the itemprop is about to add a property of the product, for example itemprop=”location”.
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/Product”>
<span itemprop=”name”>LG 55” 1080p HDR Curved OLED Smart TV</span>
<div itemprop=”aggregateRating”
itemscope itemtype=”http://schema.org/AggregateRating”>
Rated <span itemprop=”ratingValue”>4.2</span>/5
And this is how search engines understand and display your info as Google Rich Snippets.
If you run an online store it’s key to start adding information microdata in your product pages. You can start with the product markup which is one of the most important pieces of information because you can specify which product attributes you want to display. You can also show ratings and reviews and/or product availability, depending on your marketing strategy.
<link itemprop=”availability” href=”http://schema.org/InStock” />In stock
Example of the Availability property (Itemprop)
Depending on your type of customers, another important itemprop to use is the The Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) – the SKU number.
Microformats & RFDa
Microformats are often used on event calendars and reviews. The most important types of microformats are hcard (use for people), hcalendar (used to add information about an Event) and hreview (used to review restaurants, books or movies).
RFDa has 4 important attributes: voctype, typeof, property and resource.
This HTML5 extension help you markup things about Places, Events, Recipes, People and Reviews. The information types in RDFa are called entities and each entity has a number of properties.
In this example, the vocabulary we are using is on Schema.org library, then speficied with the type of the thing that we are talking about (“Person) and finally we highlighted in blue the type of data we like to point out to the search engines.
<p vocab=”http://schema.org/” typeof=”Person”>
My name is
<span property=”name”>John Smith</span>
and you can give me a ring via
<span property=”telephone”>1-800-545-0179</span>
or visit
<a property=”url” href=”http://discover.org/“>my homepage</a>.
</p>
Remember that the more product information you mark up with Structured Data, the more information search engines will have to match your page with search queries.
Once you have added all your microdata to your products pages, be sure to test it in Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
