How Schema Markup Can Take SEO to the Next Level
Anyone making use of SEO wants to take it to the next level. SEO, or search engine optimization, can be seen as something of an arms race. Almost anyone with a website is trying to leverage SEO to beat the competition. However, one of the problems comes from the fact that the tools are fairly standardized at this point. One might think of it as someone trying to win a race against people who are perfectly in sync with them. The winner tends to be more about luck in those instances than skill. That’s because everyone is starting from roughly the same place and moving at the same pace. This is the case with many SEO techniques as well.
To be sure, using SEO is an absolute necessity at this point. SEO is how one gets in line with everyone else who’s competing for the top spots in the search engines. However, one also needs to look for powerful new SEO techniques in order to get a real advantage over the competition. This is where the best SEO agencies really shine. The main thing they bring to the table are new techniques which their competitors don’t or can’t use. For example, consider the case of structured data in SEO.
Structured data is itself one of the less widely known techniques for SEO. This is due to the fact that it’s still fairly new in the greater scheme of things. Or, rather, it might be better to say that the modern form of it is distinct from structured data in the past. Today structured data is a markup language unto itself. In the past people used basic keyword stuffing to try to push ahead of the competition. Today’s structured data is similar in one respect. Structured data helps to effectively bridge the language barrier between website content and search engine.
A search engine can’t really understand the written word in the same way a human might. More advanced scrapers can often get the general gist of a site’s contents. Natural language processing, or NLP, has advanced quite a bit over the years. This technique uses powerful artificial intelligence based techniques to give programs a rough idea of tone or subject matter when given written data. However, it’s still a fairly ineffective way of describing a site’s content. This is where structured data comes into the picture. It’s essentially a quick blurb written with data and syntax which is easier for search engines to understand. It’s an immensely effective way of boosting one’s ranking in search engines. But it becomes even more powerful when combined with schema markup.
36.6% of the top results on a search engine will use structured data generated by schema markup. Meanwhile only 0.3% of websites as a whole make use of it. One can compare these numbers to see just how much of a boost schema markup gives over the competition. There’s good reason why the best SEO agencies use schema markup. Basic structured data is essentially similar to how websites were created in the late 90s. The data is effective, but static. Todays websites use dynamically generated content so that it can change in response to new updates. However, standard structured data isn’t able to do this. Schema markup brings structured data into a modern context. It means that one can essentially use the same underlying database driven technologies for structured data as the website itself uses.
All of this suggests one very important point. Getting ahead on today’s web means using the newest and most powerful SEO based techniques. The best SEO companies use new systems like schema markup. And in doing so these companies are able to get great results for their clients.
